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THE STORY OF MANKIND 


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PREHISTORY AND HISTORY 


The A£ce#v7 

opJJ/viAr* . 





























The Story of Mankind 


School Edition 

bp 

> J 

Hendrik Willem Van Loon 


) > r 


> 


jQeto gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

. 1923 

A ll rights reserved 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Copyright, 1921, 

By BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC. 


Copyright, 1923, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1923 


JAN 31 1923 


©C1A698125 


'•f'Ki | /• 





To JIMMIE 

“What is the use of a book without pictures ?” said Alice. 



V 

















































FOREWORD 


For Hansje and Willem: 

When I was twelve or thirteen years old, an uncle of 
mine who gave me my love for books and pictures promised 
to take me upon a memorable expedition. I was to go with 
him to the top of the tower of Old Saint Lawrence in Rotter¬ 
dam. 

And so, one fine day, a sexton with a key as large as that 
of Saint Peter opened a mysterious door. “Ring the bell/’ 
he said, “when you come back and want to get out,” and with 
a great grinding of rusty old hinges he separated us from the 
noise of the busy street and locked us into a world of new and 
strange experiences. 

For the first time in my life I was confronted by the phe¬ 
nomenon of audible silence. When we had climbed the first 
flight of stairs, I added another discovery to my limited knowl¬ 
edge of natural phenomena—that of tangible darkness. A 
match showed us where the upward road continued. We went 
to the next floor and then to the next and the next until I had 
lost count and then there came still another floor, and suddenly 
we had plenty of light. This floor was on an even height with 
the roof of the church, and was used as a storeroom. Covered 
with many inches of dust, there lay the abandoned symbols 
of a venerable faith which had been discarded by the people 
of the city many years ago. That which had meant life and 
death to our ancestors was here reduced to junk and rubbish. 
The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved images 


Vll 







FOREWORD 


• •• 

VUl 

and the ever watchful spider had opened up shop between the 
outspread arms of a kindly saint. 

The next floor showed us from where we had derived our 
light. Enormous open windows with heavy iron bars made 
the high and barren room the roosting place of hundreds of 
pigeons. The wind blew through the iron bars and the air was 
filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was the noise of the 
town below us, but a noise which had been purified and cleansed 
by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking 
of horses’ hoofs, the winding of cranes and pulleys, the hissing 
sound of the patient steam which had been set to do the work 
of man in a thousand different ways—they had all been 
blended into a softly rustling whisper which provided a beau¬ 
tiful background for the trembling cooing of the pigeons. 

Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began. And 
after the first ladder (a slippery old thing which made one feel 
his way with a cautious foot) there was a new and even greater 
wonder, the town clock. I saw the heart of time. I could hear 
the heavy pulsebeats of the rapid seconds—one—two—three— 
up to sixty. Then a sudden quivering noise when all the wheels 
seemed to stop and another minute had been chopped off eter¬ 
nity. Without a pause it began again—one—two—three—until 
at last after a warning rumble and the scraping of many wheels 
a thunderous voice, high above us, told the world that it was 
the hour of noon. 

On the next floor were the bells, the nice little bells and 
their terrible sisters. In the center was the big bell, which made 
me turn stiff with fright when I heard it in the middle of the 
night telling a story of fire or flood. In solitary grandeur it 
semed to reflect upon those six hundred years during which 
it had shared the joys and the sorrows of the good people of 
Rotterdam. Around it, neatly arranged like the blue jars in 
an old-fashioned apothecary shop, hung the little fellows, who 
twice each week played a merry tune for the benefit of the 
country folk who had come to market to buy and sell and hear 
what the big world had been doing. But in a corner—all alone 











FOREWORD 


IX 


and shunned by the others—hung a big black bell, silent and 
stern, the bell of death. 

Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and 
even more dangerous than those we had climbed before, and 
suddenly the fresh air of the wide heavens. We had reached 
the highest gallery. Above us the sky. Below us the city— 
a little toy-town, where busy ants were hastily crawling hither 
and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular business, 
and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the 
open country. 

It was my first glimpse of the big world. 

Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have 
gone to the top of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard 
work, but it repaid in full the mere physical exertion of climb¬ 
ing a few stairs. 

Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the 
land and the sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind 
friend the watchman, who lived in a small shack built in a 
sheltered corner of the gallery. He looked after the clock 
and was a father to the bells, and he warned of fires, but he 
enjoyed many free hours, when he smoked a pipe and thought 
his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost 
fifty years before and he had rarely read a book, but he had 
lived on the top of his tower for so many years that he had 
absorbed the wisdom of that wide world which surrounded him 
on all sides. 

History he knew well, for it was a living thing with him. 
“There,” he would say, pointing to a bend of the river, “there, 
my boy, do you see those trees? That is where the Prince of 
Orange cut the dikes to drown the land and save Leyden.” 
Or he would tell me the tale of the old Meuse, until the broad 
river ceased to be a convenient harbor and became a wonder¬ 
ful highroad, carrying the ships of De Ruyter and Tromp upon 
that famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the 
sea might be free to all. 

Then there were the little villages, clustering around the 
protecting church which once, many years ago, had been the 



X 


FOREWORD 


home of their Patron Saints. In the distance we could see the 
leaning tower of Delft. Within sight of its high arches, 
William the Silent had been murdered, and there Grotius had 
learned to construe his first Latin sentences. And still further 
away, the long low body of the church of Gouda, the early home 
of the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of 
many an emperor, the charity-boy whom the world came to 
know as Erasmus. 

Finally the silver line of the endless sea, and as a contrast, 
immediately below us, the patchwork of roofs and chimneys 
and houses and gardens and hospitals and schools and rail¬ 
ways, which we called our home. But the tower showed us 
the old home in a new light. The confused commotion of the 
streets and the market place, of the factories and the work¬ 
shop, became the well-ordered expression of human energy 
and purpose. Best of all, the wide view of the glorious past, 
which surrounded us on all sides, gave us new courage to face 
the problems of the future when we had gone back to our daily 
tasks. 

History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time 
has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages.' It is no easy 
task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the bene¬ 
fit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are 
strong and it can be done. 

Here I give you the key that will open the door. 

When you return, you too will understand the reason for 
my enthusiasm. 


Hendrik Willem van Loon. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

1. The Setting of the Stage.3 

2. Our Earliest Ancestors.9 

3. Prehistoric Man Begins to Make Things for Himself . . 12 

4. The Egyptians Invent the Art of Writing and the Record 

of History Begins.16 

5. The Beginning of Civilization in the Valley of the Nile . 21 

6. The Rise and Fall of Egypt.26 

7. Mesopotamia, the Second Center of Eastern Civilization . 28 

8. The Sumerian Nail Writers, Whose Clay Tablets Tell Us 

the Story of Assyria and Babylonia, the Great Semitic 
Melting-Pot.29 

9. The Story of Moses, the Leader of the Jewish People . . 34 

10. The Phoenicians, Who Gave Us Our Alphabet ... 38 

11. The Indo-European Persians Conquer the Semitic and the 

Egyptian World.. 40 

12. The People of the jEgean Sea Carried the Civilization of 

Old Asia into the Wilderness of Europe .... 43 

13. Meanwhile the Indo-European Tribe of the Hellenes Was 

Taking Possession of Greece.49 

14. The Greek Cities That Were Really States .... 53 

15. The Greeks Were the First People to Try the Difficult 

Experiment of Self-Government.57 

16. How the Greeks Lived.61 

17. The Origins of the Theater, the First Form of Public 

Amusement.66 

18. How the Greeks Defended Europe against an Asiatic In¬ 

vasion and Drove the Persians Back across the ^Egean Sea 69 

19. How Athens and Sparta Fought a Long and Disastrous War 

for the Leadership of Greece.75 

20. Alexander the Macedonian Established a Greek World- 

Empire, and^What Became of This High Ambition . . 77 

21. A Short Summary of Chapters 1 to 20.80 

22. The Semitic Colony of Carthage on the Northern Coast of 

Africa and the Indo-European City of Rome on the West 
Coast of Italy Fought Each Other for the Possession of 
the Western Mediterranean and Carthage Was Destroyed 83 

23. The Rise of Rome.98 

24. How the Republic of Rome, after Centuries of Unrest and 

Revolution, Became an Empire.101 

25. The Story of Joshua of Nazareth, Whom the Greeks Called 

Jesus .Ill 

26. The Twilight of Rome.116 


Xl 









Xll 


CONTENTS 


27. How Rome Became the Center of the Christian World 

28. Ahmed, the Camel Driver, Who Became the Prophet of the 

Arabian Desert, and Whose Followers Almost Conquered 
the Entire Known World for the Greater Glory of 
Allah, the “Only True God” ....... 

29. How Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, Came to Bear 

the Title of Emperor and Tried to Revive the Old Ideal 
of World-Empire ......... 

30. Why the People of the Tenth Century Prayed the Lord 

to Protect Them from the Fury of the Norsemen 

31. How Central Europe, Attacked from Three Sides, Became 

an Armed Camp and Why Europe Would Have Perished 
without Those Professional Soldiers and Administrators 
Who Were Part of the Feudal System. 

32. Chivalry. 

33. The Strange Double Loyalty of the People of the Middle 

Ages, and How It Led to Endless Quarrels between the 
Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors ..... 

34. But All These Different Quarrels Were Forgotten When 

the Turks Took the Holy Land, Desecrated the Holy 
Places, and Interfered Seriously with the Trade from 
East to West. Europe Went Crusading .... 

35. Why the People of the Middle Ages Said That “City Air 

Is Free Air”. 

36. How the People of the Cities Asserted Their Right to Be 

Heard in the Royal Councils of Their Country 

37. What the People of the Middle Ages Thought of the 

World in Which They Happened to Live .... 

38. How the Crusaders Once More Made the Mediterranean a 

Busy Center of Trade and How the Cities of the Italian 
Peninsula Became the Great Distributing Center for the 
Commerce with Asia and Africa ...... 

39. People Once More Dared to Be Happy Just Because They 

Were Alive. They Tried to Save the Remains of the 
Older and More Agreeable Civilization of Rome and 
Greece and They Were so Proud of Their Achievements 
That They Spoke of a “Renaissance” or Rebirth of 
Civilization. 

40. The People Began to Feel the Need of Giving Expression 

to Their Newly Discovered Joy of Living. They Ex¬ 
pressed Their Happiness in Poetry and in Sculpture and 
in Architecture and Painting, and in the Books They 
Printed. 

41. But Now That People Had Broken Through the Bonds of 

Their Narrow Medieval Limitations, They Had to Have 
More Room for Their Wanderings. The European World 
Had Grown Too Small for Their Ambitions. It Was the 
Time of the Great Voyages of Discovery .... 


PAGE 

122 

129 

135 

141 

146 

150 

153 

160 

166 

177 

183 

191 

199 

211 

217 



CONTENTS 


• • • 
Xlll 

PAGE 

42. Concerning Buddha and Confucius.233 

43. The Progress of the Human Race Is Best Compared to a 

Gigantic Pendulum Which Forever Swings Forward and 
Backward. The Religious Indifference and the Artistic 
and Literary Enthusiasm of the Renaissance Were Fol¬ 
lowed by the Artistic and Literary Indifference and the 
Religious Enthusiasm of the Reformation .... 244 

44. The Age of the Great Religious Controversies . . . 254 

45. How the Struggle Between the “Divine Right of Kings” 

and the Less Divine But More Reasonable “Right of 
Parliament” Ended Disastrously for King Charles I . 271 

46. In France, on the Other Hand, the “Divine Right of Kings” 

Continued with Greater Pomp and Splendor Than Ever 
Before and the Ambition of the Ruler Was Tempered 
Only by the Newly Invented Law of the “Balance of 
Power”.287 

47. The Story of the Mysterious Muscovite Empire Which Sud¬ 

denly Burst upon the Grand Political Stage of Europe 292 

48. Russia and Sweden Fought Many Wars to Decide Who 

Should Be the Leading Power of Northeastern Europe 300 

49. The Extraordinary Rise of a Little State in a Dreary Part 

of Northern Germany, Called Prussia.304 

50. How the Newly Founded National or Dynastic States of 

Europe Tried to Make Themselves Rich and What Was 
Meant by the Mercantile System.308 

51. At the End of the Eighteenth Century Europe Heard 

Strange Reports of Something Which Had Happened in 
the Wilderness of the North American Continent. The 
Descendants of the Men Who Had Punished King Charles 
for His Insistence upon His “Divine Rights” Added a 
New Chapter to the Old Story of the Struggle for Self- 


Government . 314 

52. The Great French Revolution Proclaims the Principles 

of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality Unto All the 
People of the Earth. 326 

53. Napoleon. 340 

54. As Soon as Napoleon Had Been Sent to St. Helena, the 

Rulers Who So Often Had Been Defeated by the Hated 


“Corsican” Met at Vienna and Tried to Undo the Many 
Changes Which Had Been Brought About by the French 

Revolution. 352 

55. They Tried to Assure the World an Era of Undisturbed 
Peace by Suppressing All New Ideas. They Made the 
Police-Spy the Highest Functionary in the State and 
Soon the Prisons of All Countries Were Filled with 
Those Who Claimed That People Have the Right to 
Govern Themselves as They See Fit 


363 







xiv 


CONTENTS 


56. The Love of National Independence, However, Was Too 

Strong to Be Destroyed in This Way. The South Ameri¬ 
cans Were the First to Rebel against the Reactionary 
Measures of the Congress of Vienna. Greece and Bel¬ 
gium and Spain and a Large Number of Other Countries 
of the European Continent Followed Suit and the Nine¬ 
teenth Century Was Filled with the Rumor of Many 
Wars of Independence ........ 

57. But While the People of Europe Were Fighting for Their 

National Independence, the World in Which They Lived 
Had Been Entirely Changed by a Series of Inventions, 
Which Had Made the Clumsy Old Steam-Engine of the 
Eighteenth Century the Most Faithful and Efficient 
Slave of Man.. 

58. The New Engines Were Very Expensive and Only People 

of Wealth Could Afford Them. The Old Carpenter or 
Shoemaker Who Had Been His Own Master in His Little 
Workshop Was Obliged to Hire Himself Out to the Own¬ 
ers of the Big Mechanical Tools, and While He Made 
More Money Than Before, He Lost His Former Independ¬ 
ence and He Did Not Like That. 

59. The General Introduction of Machinery Did Not Bring 

About the Era of Happiness and Prosperity Which Had 
Been Predicted by the Generation Which Saw the Stage 
Coach Replaced by the Railroad. Several Remedies Were 
Suggested, but None of These Quite Solved the Problem 

60. But the World Had Undergone Another Change Which Was 

of Greater Importance Than Either the Political or the 
Industrial Revolutions. After Generations of Oppres¬ 
sion and Persecution, the Scientist Had at Last Gained 
Liberty of Action and He Was Now Trying to Discover 
the Fundamental Laws Which Govern the Universe . 

61. A Chapter of Art. 

62. The Last Fifty Years ......... 

63. The Great War, Which Was Really the Struggle for a 

New and Better World. 

64. An Historical Reading List for Children .... 

65. Questions and Exercises. 


page 


370 


390 


401 


407 


414 

420 

433 

437 

447 

455 


Index 




THE STORY OF MANKIND 



High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there 
stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles 
wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this 
rock to sharpen its beak. 

When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day 
of eternity will have gone by. 
































THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 


We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. 

Who are we? 

Where do we come from? 

Whither are we bound? 

Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing 
this question mark farther and farther towards that distant 
line, beyond the horizon, where we hope to find our answer. 

We have not gone very far. 

We still know very little, but we have reached the point 
where (with a fair degree of accuracy) we can guess at many 
things. 

In this chapter I shall tell you how (according to our best 
belief) the stage was set for the first appearance of man. 

If we represent the time during which it has been possible 
for animal life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length, 



% 


then the tiny line just below indicates the age during which 
man (or a creature more or less resembling man) has lived 
upon this earth. 

Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for 
the purpose of conquering the forces of nature. That is the 
reason why we are going to study him, rather than cats or 


3 







4 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


dogs or horses or any of the other animals, which, all in their 
own way, have a very long and a very interesting historical 
development behind them. 

In the beginning, the planet upon which we live was (as far 

as we now know) a large ball of 
flaming matter, a tiny cloud of 
smoke in the endless ocean of 
space. Gradually, in the course 
of millions of years, the sur¬ 
face burned itself out, and was 
covered with a thin layer of 
rocks. Upon these lifeless 
rocks the rain descended in end¬ 
less torrents, wearing out the 
hard granite and carrying the 
dust to the valleys that lay hid¬ 
den between the high cliffs of 
the steaming earth. 

Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the 
clouds and saw how this little planet was covered with a few 
small puddles which were to develop into the mighty oceans of 
the eastern and western hemispheres. 

Then one day the great wonder happened. What had 
been dead, gave birth to life. 

The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea. 

For millions of years living things drifted aimlessly with 
the currents. But during all that time they were developing 
certain habits that they might survive more easily upon the in¬ 
hospitable earth. Some of these cells were happiest in the 
dark depths of the lakes and the pools. They took root in the 
slimy sediments which had been carried down from the tops 
of the hills and they became plants. Others preferred to move 
about; and they grew strange jointed legs, like scorpions, and 
began to crawl along the bottom of the sea amidst the plants 
and the pale green things that looked like jelly-fishes. Still 
others (covered with scales) depended upon a swimming 
motion to go from place to place in their search for food, and 



IT RAINED INCESSANTLY 








THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 


5 


gradually they populated the ocean with myriads of fishes. 

Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they 
had to search for new dwelling places. There was no more 
room for them at the bottom of the sea. Reluctantly they 
left the water and made a new home in the marshes and on the 
mudbanks that lay at the foot of the mountains. Twice a day 



THE ASCENT OF MAN 


the tides of the ocean covered them with their brine. For the 
rest of the time, the plants made the best of their uncom¬ 
fortable situation and tried to survive in the thin air which 
surrounded the surface of the planet. After centuries of 



























































6 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 



THE PLANTS LEAVE THE SEA 


training, they learned how to live as comfortably in the air as 
they had done in the water. They increased in size and became 
shrubs and trees; and at last they learned how to grow lovely 
flowers which attracted the attention of the busy big humble- 

bees and the birds which car¬ 
ried the seeds far and wide, 
until the whole earth had be¬ 
come covered with green pas¬ 
tures or lay dark under the 
shadow of the big trees. 

But some of the fishes too 
had begun to leave the sea, and 
they had learned how to 
breathe with lungs as well as 
with gills. We call such crea¬ 
tures amphibious, which means 
that they are able to live with 
equal ease on the land and in 
the water. The first frog that 
crosses your path can tell you all about the pleasures of the 
double existence of the amphibian. 

Once outside of the water, these animals gradually adapted 
themselves more and more to life on land. Some became rep¬ 
tiles (creatures that crawl like lizards) and shared the silence 
of the forests with the insects. That they might move faster 
through the soft soil, they improved upon their legs; and their 
size increased until the world was populated with gigantic 
forms (which the handbooks of biology list under the names 
of Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaurus and Brontosaurus) which 
grew to be thirty to forty feet long and which could have 
played with elephants as a full grown cat plays with her kittens. 

Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live 
in the tops of the trees, which were then often more than a 
hundred feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the 
purpose of walking, but it was necessary for them to move 
quickly from branch to branch. And so they changed a part 
of their skin into a sort of parachute, which stretched between 






THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 


Y 

the sides of their bodies and the small toes of their forefeet, 
and gradually they covered this skinny parachute with feathers 
and made their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree 
to tree and developed into true birds. 

Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles 
died within a short time. We do not know the reason. Per¬ 
haps it was due to a sudden change in climate. Perhaps they 
had grown so large that they could neither swim nor walk nor 
crawl, and they starved to death within sight but not within 
reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the 
million-year-old world empire of the big reptiles was over. 

The world now began to be occupied by very different 
creatures. They were the descendants of the reptiles, but they 
were quite unlike these because they fed their young from the 
“mammae” or the breasts of the mother. Wherefore modern 
science calls these animals “mammals.” They had shed the 
scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of the bird, 
but they covered their bodies with hair. The mammals, how¬ 
ever, developed other habits which gave their race a great ad¬ 
vantage over the other animals. The female of the species 
carried the eggs of the young inside her body until they were 
hatched. While all other living beings, up to that time, had 
left their children exposed to the dangers of cold and heat 
and the attacks of wild beasts, the mammals kept their young 
with them for a long time and sheltered them while they were 
still too weak to fight their enemies. In this way the young 
mammals were given a much better chance to survive, because 
they learned many things from their mothers, as you will know 
if you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens how to 
take care of themselves and how to wash their faces and how 
to catch mice. 

But of these mammals I need not tell you much, for you 
know them well. They surround you on all sides. They are 
your daily companions in the streets and in your home, and you 
can see your less familiar cousins behind the bars of the 
zoological garden. 


8 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


And now we come to the parting of the ways, when man 
suddenly leaves the endless procession of dumbly living and 
dying creatures and begins to use his reason to shape the 
destiny of his race. 

One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in 
its ability to find food and shelter. It had learned to use its 
forefeet for the purpose of holding its prey, and by dint of 
practice it had developed a handlike claw. After innumer¬ 
able attempts it had learned how to balance the whole of the 
body upon the hind legs. (This is a difficult act, which every 
child has to learn anew although the human race has been 
doing it for over a million years.) 

This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to 
both, became the most successful hunter and could make a 
living in every clime. For greater safety, it usually moved 
about in groups. It learned how to make strange grunts to 
warn its young of approaching danger, and after hundreds 
of thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises for 
the purpose of talking. 

This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your 
first “manlike” ancestor. 


OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS 


A 


We know very little about the first “true” men. We have 
never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an 
ancient soil we have sometimes found pieces of their hones. 
These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals 
that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. 
Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives to 



THE GROWTH OF THE HUMAN SKULL 


the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have 
taken these bones and have been able to reconstruct our earliest 
ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy. 

The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very 
ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much 
smaller than the people of to-day. The heat of the sun and the 
biting wind of the cold winter had colored his skin a dark 

9 









10 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


brown. His head and most of his body, his arms and legs too, 
were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but 
strong fingers, which made his hands look like those of a mon¬ 
key. His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a 
wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He 
wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the 
rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke 
and their lava. 

He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the 
pygmies of Africa do to this very day. When he felt the 
pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or 
he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his 
own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase, 
he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a 
rabbit. These he would eat raw, for he had never discovered 
that food tasted better when it was cooked. 

During the hours of day, this primitive human being 
prowled about looking for things to eat. 

When night descended uj)on the earth, he hid his wife and 
his children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy bowlders, 
for he was surrounded on all sides by ferocious animals and 
when it was dark these animals began to prowl about, looking 
for something to eat for their mates and their own young, and 
they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where 
you must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy 
because it was full of fear. 

In summer, man was exposed to the scorching rays of the 
sun, and during the winter his children would freeze to death 
in his arms. When such a creature hurt itself (and hunting 
animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their 
ankles), he had no one to take care of him and he must die a 
horrible death. 

Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their 
strange noises, early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he 
endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it 
pleased him to hear the sound of his voice. In due time he 
learned that he could use this guttural noise to warn his fellow 


OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS 


11 


beings whenever danger threatened, and he gave certain little 
shrieks which came to mean “There is a tiger!” or “Here come 
five elephants.” Then the others grunted something back at 
him, and their growl meant, “I see them,” or “Let us run away 
and hide.” And this was probably the origin of all language. 

But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know 
very little. Early man had no tools and he built himself no 
houses. He lived and died and left no trace of his existence 
except a few collar-bones and a few pieces of his skull. These 
tell us that many thousands of years ago the world was in¬ 
habited by certain mammals who were quite different from 
all the other animals—who had probably developed from an¬ 
other unknown apelike animal which had learned to walk on 
its hind legs and use its forepaws as hands—and who were 
most probably connected with the creatures who happen to be 
our own immediate ancestors. 

It is little enough we know, and the rest is darkness. 




PREHISTORIC MAN 


Early man did not know what time meant. He kept 
no records of birthdays or wedding anniversaries or the hour 
of death. He had no idea of days or weeks or even years. 
But in a general way he kept track of the seasons, for he had 
noticed that the cold winter was invariably followed by the mild 
spring—that spring grew into the hot summer when fruits 
ripened and the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten, and 
that summer ended when sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves 
from the trees and a number of animals were getting ready 
for the long sleep of winter. 

But now, something unusual and rather frightening had 
happened. Something was the matter with the weather. The 
warm days of summer had come very late. The fruits had 
not ripened. The tops of the mountains which used to be cov¬ 
ered with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a heavy 
burden of snow. 

Then, one morning, a number of wild people, different 
from the other creatures who lived in that neighborhood, came 
wandering down from the region of the high peaks. They 
looked lean and appeared to be starving. They uttered sounds 
which no one could understand. They seemed to say that 
they were hungry. There was not food enough for both the 
old inhabitants and the newcomers. When they tried to stay 
more than a few days there was a terrible battle with clawlike 
hands and feet and whole families were killed. The others fled 
back to their mountain slopes and died in the next blizzard. 


12 








PREHISTORIC MAN 


13 


But the people in the forest were greatly frightened. All 
the time the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than 
they ought to have been. 

Finally, in a gap between two high hills, there appeared a 
tiny speck of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A 
gigantic glacier came sliding slowly downhill. Huge stones 
were being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen 
thunderstorms torrents of ice and mud and blocks of granite 
suddenly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed 
them while they slept. Century-old trees were crushed into 
kindling wood. And then it began to snow. 

It snowed for months and months. All the plants died and 
the animals fled in search of the southern sun. Man hoisted 
his young upon his back and followed them. But he could not 
travel as fast as the wilder creatures and he was forced to 
choose between quick thinking or quick dying. He seems to 
have preferred the former, for he has managed to survive the 
terrible glacial periods which upon four different occasions 
threatened to kill every human being on the face of the earth. 

In the first place it was necessary that man clothe himself 
lest he freeze to death. He learned how to dig holes and cover 
them with branches and leaves and in these traps he caught 
bears and hyenas, which he then killed with heavy stones and 
whose skins he used as coats for himself and his family. 

Next came the housing problem. This was simple. Many 
animals were in the habit of sleeping in dark caves. Man now 
followed their example, drove the animals out of their warm 
homes, and claimed them for his own. 

Even so, the climate was too severe for most people, and 
the old and the young died at a terrible rate. Then a genius 
bethought himself of the use of fire. Once, while out hunting, 
he had been caught in a forest fire. He remembered that he 
had been almost roasted to death by the flames. Thus far fire 
had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree 
was dragged into the cave and lighted by means of smolder¬ 
ing branches from a burning wood. This turned the cave into 
a cozy little room. 



PREHISTORIC EUROPE 






























PREHISTORIC MAN 


15 


And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire. It 
was not rescued until it had been well roasted. Man discovered 
that meat tasted better when cooked, and he then and there 
discarded one of the old habits which he had shared with the 
other animals and began to prepare his food. 

In this way thousands of years passed. Only the people 
with the cleverest brains survived. They had to struggle day 
and night against cold and hunger. They were forced to in¬ 
vent tools. They learned how to sharpen stones into axes and 
how to make hammers. They were obliged to put up large 
stores of food for the endless days of the winter, and they found 
that clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in 
the rays of the sun. And so the glacial period, which had 
threatened to destroy the human race, became its greatest 
teacher because it forced man to use his brain. 


HIEROGLYPHICS 


These earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great 
European wilderness were rapidly learning many new things. 
It is safe to say that in due course of time they would have 
given up the ways of savages and would have developed a 
civilization of their own. But suddenly there came an end to 
their isolation. They were discovered. 

A traveler from an unknown southland who had dared to 
cross the sea and the high mountain passes had found his way 
to the wild people of the European continent. He came from 
Africa. His home was in Egypt. 

The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civili¬ 
zation thousands of years before the people of the West had 
dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. 
And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in 
their caves, while we visit the southern and eastern shores of 
the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest school of the 
human race. 

The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were 
excellent farmers. They knew about irrigation. They built 
temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which 
served as the earliest models for the churches in which we wor¬ 
ship nowadays. They had invented a calendar, which proved 
such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time 
that it has survived with a few changes until to-day. But most 
important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve 
speech for the benefit of future generations. They had in¬ 
vented the art of writing. 


16 







HIEROGLYPHICS 


17 


We are so aceustomed to newspapers and books and maga¬ 
zines that we take it for granted that the world has always been 
able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most 
important of all inventions, is quite new. Without written 
documents we should he like cats and dogs, who can only teach 
their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who, 
because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can 
make use of the experience of those generations of cats and 
dogs that have gone before. 

In the first century before our era, when the Romans came 
to Egypt, they found the valley full of strange little pic¬ 
tures which seemed to have something to do with the history 
of the country. But the Romans were not interested in “any¬ 
thing foreign” and did not inquire into the origin of these queer 
figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of 
the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the 
papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had 
understood the holy art of making such pictures had died sev¬ 
eral years before. Egypt, deprived of its independence, had 
become a storehouse filled with important historical documents 
which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use 
to either man or beast. 

Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land 
of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the 
name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to pre¬ 
pare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did 
not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, 
quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the 
problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language. 

One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary 
life of his little fortress on the Rosetta River (a mouth of the 
Nile), decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among 
the ruins of the Nile delta. And behold! he found a stone 
which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt 
it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of 
black basalt was different from anything that had ever been 
discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was 


18 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


in Greek. The Greek language was known. “All that is 
necessary,” so he reasoned, “is to compare the Greek text with 
the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets.” 

The plan sounded simple enough, but it took more than 
twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French 
professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the 
Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In 
the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the mean¬ 
ing of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from 
overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had 
become known. To-day the story of the valley of the Nile is 
better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River. 
We possess a written record which covers four thousand years 
of chronicled history. 

As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means 
“sacred writing”) have played such a very great role in his¬ 
tory, (a few of them in modified form have even found their 
way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something 
about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago 
to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming 
generations. 

Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every 
Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to 
strange messages written in the form of little pictures which 
tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters 
there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to 
understand the meaning of such messages. 

Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The 
clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long 
before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object 
which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now. 

Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were 
examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hiero¬ 
glyphics. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with 
a saw. “Very well,” you would say, “that means of course that 
a farmer went out to cut down a tree.” Then you take another 
papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age 


HIEROGLYPHICS 


19 


of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture 
of the man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle 
saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But 
what ? 

That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. 
He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what 
we now call “phonetic writing”—a system of characters which 
reproduce the “sound” (or 'phone) of the spoken word and 
which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words 
into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes 
and pothooks. 

Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. 
The word “saw” either means a certain tool which you will find 
in a carpenter’s shop, or it means the past tense of the verb 
“to see.” 

This is what had happened to the word during the course 
of centuries. First of all it had meant only the particular tool 
which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it 
had become the past tense of a verb. After several hun¬ 
dred years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and 


the picture 



came to stand for a single letter, the 


letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here 
is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in 
hieroglyphics. 



The 



either means one of these two round objects 


in your head which allow you to see, or it means “I,” the per¬ 
son who is talking. 























20 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 



is either an insect which gathers honey, or it 


represents the verb “to be” which means to exist. Again, it 
may he the first part of a verb like “be-come” or “be-have.” 


In this particular instance it is followed by 



, which 


means a “leaf” or “leave” or “lieve” (the sound of all three 
words is about the same). 

The “eve” you know all about. 



V, 


It is a giraffe. 


It is part of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyph¬ 
ics developed. 

You can now read that sentence without much difficulty. 

“I believe I saw a giraffe.” 

Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it 
during thousands of years until they could write anything they 
wanted, and they used these “canned words” to send messages 
to friends, to keep business accounts, and to keep a record of 
the history of their country, that future generations might 
benefit by the mistakes of the past. 


r 























THE NILE VALLEY 


The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in 
search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has 
traveled to make his home. 

The fame of the valley of the Nile must have spread at 
an early date. From the interior of Africa and from the desert 
of Arabia and from the western part of Asia people had 
flocked to Egypt to claim their share of the rich farms. 
Together these invaders had formed a new race which called 
itself “Remi” or “the Men,” just as we sometimes call America 
“God’s own country.” They had good reason to be grateful 
to a Fate which had carried them to this narrow strip of land. 
In the summer of each year the Nile turned the valley into a 
shallow lake, and when the waters receded all the grain fields 
and the pastures were covered with several inches of the most 
fertile clay. 

In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and 
made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first 
large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all 
the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated 
system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from 
the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even 
more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it through¬ 
out the land. 

While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend 
sixteen hours out of every twenty-four gathering food for him¬ 
self and the members of his tribe, the Egyptian peasant or the 


21 








22 


TIIE STORY OF MANKIND 



THE VALLEY OF EGYPT 


inhabitant of the Egyptian city found himself possessed of a 
certain leisure. He used this spare time to make himself many 
things that were merely ornamental and not the least bit 
useful. 

More than that. Gradually he discovered that his brain was 
capable of thinking all kinds of thoughts which had nothing 
to do with the problems of eating and sleeping and finding a 
home for the children. The Egyptian began to speculate upon 
many strange problems that confronted him. Where did the 
stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which 
frightened him so terribly? Who made the River Nile rise 
with such regularity that it was possible to base the calendar 
















THE NILE VALLEY 


23 


upon the appearance and the disappearance of the annual 
floods? Who was he, himself, a strange little creature sur¬ 
rounded on all sides by death and sickness and yet happy and 
full of laughter? 

He asked these many questions and certain people oblig¬ 
ingly stepped forward to answer these inquiries to the best of 
their ability. The Egyptians called them “priests”; they be¬ 
came the guardians of his thoughts and gained great respect 
in the community. They were highly learned men who were 
entrusted with the sacred task of keeping the written records. 
They understood that it is not good for man to think only of 
his immediate advantage in this world, and they drew his at¬ 
tention to the days of the future when his soul would dwell 
beyond the mountains of the west and must give an account 
of his deeds to Osiris, the mighty god who was the Ruler of 
the Living and the Dead and who judged the acts of men 
according to their merits. Indeed, the priests made so much 
of that future day in the realm of Isis and Osiris that the 
Egyptians began to regard life merely as a short preparation 
for the Hereafter and turned the teeming valley of the Nile 
into a land devoted to the Dead. 

In a strange way, the Egyptians had come to believe that 
no soul could enter the realm of Osiris without the possession 
of the body which had been its place of residence in this world. 
Therefore as soon as a man was dead his relatives took his 
corpse and had it embalmed. For weeks it was soaked in a 
solution of natron and then it was filled with pitch. The 
Persian word for pitch was “mumiai” and the embalmed body 
was called a “mummy.” It was wrapped in yards and yards 
of specially prepared linen and it was placed in a specially 
prepared coffin ready to be removed to its final home. But 
an Egyptian grave was a real home where the body was sur¬ 
rounded by pieces of furniture and musical instruments (to 
while away the dreary hours of waiting) and by little statues 
of cooks and bakers and barbers (that the occupant of this 
dark home might be decently provided with food and need not 
go about unshaven). 


24 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 



THE BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS 


Originally these graves had been dug into the rocks of the 
western mountains, but as the Egyptians moved northward 
they were obliged to build their cemeteries in the desert. The 
desert, however, was full of wild animals and equally wild 
robbers, who broke into the graves and disturbed the mummy or 
stole the jewelry that had been buried with the body. To pre¬ 
vent such unholy desecration the Egyptians used to build small 
mounds of stones on top of the graves. These little mounds 
gradually grew in size, because the rich people built higher 
mounds than the poor, and there was a good deal of competi¬ 
tion to see who could make the highest hill of stones. The 
record was made by King Khufu, whom the Greeks called 










































THE NILE VALLEY 


25 


Cheops and who lived thirty centuries before our era. His 
mound, which the Greeks called a pyramid (because the 
Egyptian word for high was pir-em-us), was over five hundred 
feet high. 

It covered more than thirteen acres of desert, which is three 
times as much space as that occupied by the church of St. 
Peter, the largest edifice of the Christian world. 

During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were 
busy carrying the necessary stones from the other side of the 
river, ferrying them across the Nile (how they ever managed 
to do this, w^do not understand), dragging them in many in¬ 
stances a long distance across the desert, and finally hoisting 
them into their correct position. But so well did the king’s 
architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow 
passageway which leads to the royal tomb in the heart of the 
stone monster has never yet been pushed out of shape by the 
weight of those thousands of tons of stone which press upon 
it from all sides. 


THE STORY OF EGYPT 


The River Nile was a kind of friend, but occasionally it was 
a hard taskmaster. It taught the people who lived along its 
banks the noble art of “team work.” They depended upon 
each other to build their irrigation trenches and keep their 
dikes in repair. In this way they learned how to get along 
with their neighbors and their mutual benefit association quite 
easily developed into an organized state. 

Then one man grew more powerful than most of his neigh¬ 
bors. He became the leader of the community and their 
commander-in-chief when the envious neighbors of western 
Asia invaded the prosperous valley. In due course of time 
he bacame their king and ruled all the land from the Mediter¬ 
ranean to the mountains of the west. 

Rut these political adventures of the old Pharaohs (the 
word meant “the Man who lived in the Big House”) rarely 
interested the patient and toiling peasant of the grain fields. 
Provided he was not obliged to pay more taxes to his king 
than he thought just, he accepted the rule of Pharaoh as he 
accepted the rule of mighty Osiris. 

It was different, however, when a foreign invader came 
and robbed him of his possessions. After twenty centuries of 
independent life, a savage Arab tribe of shepherds, called the 
Hyksos, attacked Egypt. For five hundred }^ears they were 
the masters of the valley of the Nile. They were highly un¬ 
popular. Great hate was felt for the Hebrews also, who 
came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long 


s 


26 







THE STORY OF EGYPT 


27' 

wandering through the desert and who helped the foreign 
usurper by acting as his tax-gatherers and his civil servants. 

But shortly after the year 1700 b.c. the people of Thebes 
began a revolution. After a long struggle the Hyksos were 
driven out of the country and Egypt was free once more. 

A thousand years later, when Assyria conquered all of 
western Asia, Egypt became part of the empire of Sardan- 
apalus. In the seventh century b.c. it became once more an 
independent state, which obeyed the rule of a king who lived in 
the city of Sais in the delta of the Nile. But in the year 525 
b.c.,, Cambyses, the king of the Persians, took possession of 
Egypt, and in the fourth century b.c.,, when Persia was con¬ 
quered by Alexander the Great, Egypt too became a Mace¬ 
donian province. It regained a semblance of independence * 
when one of Alexander’s generals set himself up as king of a 
new Egyptian state and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies, 
who resided in the newly built city of Alexandria. 

Finally, in the year 39 b.c., the Romans came. The last 
Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, tried her best to save the country. 
Her beauty and charm were more dangerous to the Roman 
generals than half a dozen Egyptian army corps. Twice she 
was successful in her attacks upon the hearts of her Roman 
conquerors. But in the year 30 b.c., Augustus, the nephew 
and heir of Ca?sar, landed in Alexandria. He did not share 
his late uncle’s admiration for the lovely princess. He de¬ 
stroyed her armies, but spared her life that he might make her 
march in his triumph as part of the spoils of war. When 
Cleopatra heard of this plan, she killed herself by taking 
poison. And Egypt became a Roman province. 


MESOPOTAMIA 


I am going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid 
and I am going to ask that you imagine yourself possessed 
of the eyes of a hawk. ’Way, ’way off in the distance, far 
beyond the yellow sands of the desert, you will see something 
green and shimmering. It is a valley situated between two 
rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the 
land of mystery and wonder which the Greeks called Meso¬ 
potamia—the “country between the rivers.” 

The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates and the 
Tigris. They begin their course amidst the snows of the moun¬ 
tains of Armenia where Noah’s Ark found a resting place and 
slowly they flow through the southern plain until they reach 
the muddy banks of the Persian gulf. They perform a very 
useful service. They turn the arid regions of western Asia 
into a fertile garden. 

The valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had 
offered them food upon fairly easy terms. The “land be¬ 
tween the rivers” was popular for the same reason. It was a 
country full of promise, and both the inhabitants of the north¬ 
ern mountains and the tribes which roamed through the south¬ 
ern districts tried to claim this territory as their own and most 
exclusive possession. The constant rivalry between the moun¬ 
taineers and the desert nomads led to endless warfare. Only 
the strongest and the bravest could hope to survive. That 
will explain why Mesopotamia became the home of a very 
strong race of men who were capable of creating a civilization 
which was in every respect as important as that of Egypt. 


28 







9 


THE SUMERIANS 


The fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. 
Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Cathay and 
stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Aus¬ 
trian bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel east¬ 
ward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a 
voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not 
visited by western men until a generation later. Meanwhile 
a certain Venetian had explored the ruins of western Asia 
and had brought back reports of a most curious language 
which he had found carved in the stones of the temples and en¬ 
graved upon endless pieces of baked clay. 

But Europe was busy with many other things and it was 
not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first 
“cuneiform inscriptions” (so called because the letters were 
wedge-shaped and wedge is called “cuneus” in Latin) were 
brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr. 
Then it took thirty years before a patient German school¬ 
master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four 
letters, the D, the A, the R, and the SH, the name of the Per¬ 
sian King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by 
until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous 
inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail¬ 
writing of western Asia. 

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writ¬ 
ings, the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The 
Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest 
inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of 


29 







30 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures 
entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which 
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they 
had been developed. A few examples will show you what I 
mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into 


a brick, looked as follows: 



This sign, however, was too 


cumbersome and after a short while, when the meaning of 
“heaven” was added to that of star, the picture was simplified 


in this way 



, which made it even more of a puzzle. 


In the same way an ox changed from 



into 



and a fish changed from 



into 



. The sun 


was originally a plain circle 



and became 



If we were using the Sumerian script to-day we would make a 



look like 



• This system of writing down our 


ideas looks rather complicated, but for more than thirty cen¬ 
turies it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and 
the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races 
which forced their way into the fertile valley. 

The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and 
conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They 
were a white people who had lived in the mountains. They 















THE SUMERIANS 


31 


had been accustomed to worship their gods on the tops of 
hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed arti¬ 
ficial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They 
did not know how to build stairs and they therefore sur¬ 
rounded their towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers 



A TOWER OF BABEL 


have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad 
stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to an¬ 
other. We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumeri¬ 
ans but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirelv ab- 
sorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later 
date. Their towers, however, still stand amidst the ruins of 
Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile 
in the land of Babvlon and called them towers of Babel. 

In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had 
entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterward over¬ 
powered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the 
















32 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are 
known as the “Semites,” because in the olden days people be¬ 
lieved them to be the direct descendants of Sliem, one of the 
three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians 
were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another 



NINEVEH 


Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built him¬ 
self a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who 
gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state 
the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the 
Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over¬ 
ran the fertile valley and destroyed whatever they could not 
carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers 
of the great desert god, Ashur, who called themselves Assyr¬ 
ians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast 
and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and 
Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subjects. Then 


















THE SUMERIANS 


33 


at the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ 
the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, reestablished Babylon and 
made that city the most important capital of that day. 
Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their kings, encouraged 
the study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy 
and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which 
were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 b.c. a 
crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and 
overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years 
later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great, 
who turned the fertile valley, the old melting-pot of so many 
Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next came the Romans 
and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia became a 
vast wilderness where huge mounds of earth told a story of 
ancient glory. 


t 


MOSES 


Some time during the twentieth century before our era, 
a small and unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left 
its old home, which was situated in the land of Ur at the mouth 
of the Euphrates, and had tried to find new pastures within 
the domain of the kings of Babylonia. They had been driven 
away by the royal soldiers and had moved westward looking 
for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they might set 
up their tents. 

This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as 
we call them, the Jews. They had wandered far and wide, 
and after many years of dreary wanderings they had been given 
shelter in Egypt. For more than five centuries they had 
dwelt among the Egyptians. When their adopted country 
had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told you in 
the story of Egypt) they had managed to make themselves 
useful to the foreign invader and had been left in the undis¬ 
turbed possession of their grazing fields. But after a long 
war of independence the Egyptians had driven the Hyksos out 
of the valley of the Nile. Then the Jews had come upon evil 
times, for they had been degraded to the rank of common 
slaves and had been forced to work on the royal roads and on 
the pyramids. And as the frontiers were guarded by the 
Egyptian soldiers it had been impossible for the Jews to escape. 

After many years of suffering they were saved from their 
miserable fate by a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long 
time had dwelt in the desert. There he had learned to appre- 


34. 








~T/iE /vt/HA/y U/AAj&Efi/s/es 



THE WANDERINGS OF THE JEWS 













36 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


ciate the simple virtues of his earliest ancestors, who had kept 
away from cities and city life and had refused to let them¬ 
selves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a foreign 
civilization. 

Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways 
of the patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian 
troops that were sent after him and led his fellow tribesmen 
into the heart of the plain at the foot of Mount Sinai. Dur¬ 
ing his long and lonely life in the desert, he had learned to 
revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder and the 
Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shep¬ 
herds depended for life and light and breath. This God, one 
of the many divinities who were widely worshiped in western 
Asia, was called Jehovah. Through the teaching of Moses, he 
became the sole Master of the Hebrew race. 

One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. 
It was whispered that he had gone away carrying two tablets 
of rough-hewn stone. That afternoon, the top of the mountain 
was lost to sight. The darkness of a terrible storm hid it from 
the eye of man. But when Moses returned, behold! there stood 
engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah had spoken 
unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and 
the blinding flashes of his lightning. And from that moment, 
Jehovah was recognized by all the Jews as the Highest Master 
of their fate, the only True God, who had taught them how 
to live holy lives when he bade them follow the wise lessons 
of his Ten Commandments. 

They followed Moses when he bade them continue their 
journey through the desert. They obeyed him when he told 
them what to eat and drink and what to avoid that they might 
keep well in the hot climate. And finally after many years of 
wandering they came to a land which seemed pleasant and 
prosperous. It was called Palestine, which means the country 
of the Philistines, a small tribe of Cretans who had settled 
along the coast after they had been driven away from their 
own island. Unfortunately, the interior of the mainland, 
Palestine, was already inhabited by another Semitic race, called 


MOSES 


37 


the Canaanites. But the Jews forced their way into the val¬ 
leys and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple 
in a town which they named Jerusalem, the Home of Peace. 

As for Moses, he was no longer the leader of his people. He 
had been allowed to see the mountain ridges of Palestine from 



MOSES SEES THE HOLY LAND 


afar. Then he had closed his tired eyes for all time. He had 
worked faithfully and hard to please Jehovah. Not only had 
he guided his brethren out of foreign slavery into the free and 
independent life of a new home, but he had also made the Jews 
the first of all nations to worship a single God. 




THE PHOENICIANS 



The Phoenicians, who were the neighbors of the Jews, were 
a Semitic tribe which at a very early age had settled along the 
shores of the Mediterranean. They had built themselves two 
well-fortified towns, Tyre and Sidon, and within a short time 
they had gained a monopoly of the trade of the western seas. 


THE PHOENICIAN TRADER 

Their ships went regularly to Greece and Italy and Spain and 
even ventured beyond the Strait of Gibraltar fo visit the Scilly 
Islands, where they could buy tin. Wherever they went, they 


38 








































































THE PHOENICIANS 


39 


built themselves small trading stations or colonies. Many of 
these were the origin of modern cities, such as Cadiz and 
Marseilles. 

They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a 
good profit. They were not troubled by a conscience. If we 
are to believe all their neighbors, they did not. know what the 
words honesty or integrity meant. They regarded a well-filled 
treasure chest the highest ideal of all good citizens. Indeed 
they were very unpleasant people and did not have a single 
friend. Nevertheless they have rendered all coming genera¬ 
tions one service of the greatest possible value. They gave 
us our alphabet. 

The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, 
invented by the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks 
as a clumsy waste of time. They were practical business men 
and could not spend hours engraving two or three letters. 
They set to work and invented a new system of writing, which 
was greatly superior to the old one. They borrowed a few 
pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of 
the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed 
the pretty looks of the older system for the advantage of speed 
and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short 
and handy alphabet of twenty-two letters. 

In due course of time, this alphabet traveled across the 
jEgean Sea and entered Greece. The Greeks added a few 
letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy. 
The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught 
them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild 
barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why 
this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin 
and not in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail- 
script of the Sumerians. 


THE INDO-EUROPEANS 


The world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoe¬ 
nicia had existed almost thirty centuries and the venerable 
races of the Fertile Valley were getting old and tired. Their 
doom was sealed when a new and more energetic race appeared 
upon the horizon. We call this race the Indo-European race, 
because it conquered not only Europe but also made itself the 
ruling class in the country which is now known as British India. 

These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites, 
but they spoke a different language, which is regarded as the 
common ancestor of all European tongues with the exception 
of Hungarian and Finnish and the Basque dialects of North¬ 
ern Spain. 

When we first hear of them, they had been living along the 
shores of the Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day 
they had packed their tents and had wandered forth in search 
of a new home. Some of them had moved into the mountains 
of Central Asia, and for many centuries had lived among the 
peaks which surround the Plateau of Iran; that is why we call 
them Aryans. Others had followed the setting sun and had 
taken possession of the plains of Europe, as I shall tell you 
when I give you the story of Greece and Rome. 

For the moment we must follow the Aryans. Under the 
leadership of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), who was their great 
teacher, many of them had left their mountain homes to follow 
the swiftly flowing Indus River on its way to the sea. 


40 









THE INDO-EUROPEANS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS 






























42 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western 
Asia, and there had founded the half-independent communities 
of the Medes and the Persians, two peoples whose names we 
have copied from the old Greek history-books. In the seventh 
century before the birth of Christ, the Medes had established 
a kingdom of their own called Media; but this perished when 
Cyrus made himself king of all the Persian tribes and started 
upon a career of conquest, which soon made him and his chil¬ 
dren the undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and 
of Egypt. 

Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians 
push their triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon 
found themselves in serious difficulties with certain other Indo- 
European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe 
and had taken possession of the Greek peninsula and the 
islands of the iEgean Sea. 

These difficulties led to the three famous wars between 
Greece and Persia, during which King Darius and King 
Xerxes of Persia invaded the peninsula. They ravaged the 
lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to get a foothold upon 
the European continent. 

But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens 
proved unconquerable. By cutting off the lines of supplies 
of the Persian armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the 
Asiatic rulers to return to their base. 

It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient 
teacher, and Europe, the young and eager pupil. A great 
many of the other chapters of this book will tell you how the 
struggle between East and West has continued until this very 
day. 



i 


THE AEGEAN SEA 


When Heinrich Schlie- 
mann was a little boy his 
father told him the story of 
Troy. He liked that story 
better than anything else he 
had ever heard, and he made 
up his mind that as soon as he 
was big enough to leave 
home, he would travel to 
Greece and “find Troy.” 
That he was the son of a poor 
country parson in a Mecklen¬ 
burg village did not bother 
him. He knew that he would 
need money, so he decided to gather a fortune first and do the 
digging afterward. As a matter of fact, he managed to get 
a large fortune within a very short time, and as soon as he 
had enough money to equip an expedition, he went to the 
northwest corner of Asia Minor, where he supposed that Troy 
had been situated. 

In that particular nook of old Asia Minor stood a high 
mound covered with grainfields. According to tradition it had 
been the home of Priam, the king of Troy. Schliemann, 
whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge, 
wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he began 



THE TROJAN HORSE 


43 



















44 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


to dig. And lie dug with such zeal and such speed that his 
trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he 
was looking and carried him to the ruins of another buried 
town which was at least a thousand years older than the Troy 
of which Homer had sung. Then something very interest- 



SCHLIEMANN DIGS FOR TROY 

ing occurred. If Schliemann had found a few polished stone 
hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one 
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such ob¬ 
jects, which people had generally associated with the prehis¬ 
toric men who had lived in these regions before the coming of 
the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and very 
costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was 
unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that 















THE AEGEAN SEA 


45 



fully ten centuries before the great Trojan War the coast of 
the ADgean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men. 
These in many ways had been the superiors of the wild Greek 
tribes who had invaded their country and had destroyed their 
civilization or ab¬ 
sorbed it until it 
had lost all trace 
of originality. 

And this proved 
to be the case. In 
the late ’seventies 
of the last cen¬ 
tury, Schliemann 
visited the ruins 
of Myceme, ruins 
which were so old 
that ancient Ro¬ 
man guide-books 
marveled at their 
antiquity. There 
again, beneath 
the flat slabs of 
stone of a small 
enclosure, Schlie¬ 
mann stumbled 
upon a wonder¬ 
ful treasure- 

trove. It had been left behind by those mysterious people 
who had covered the Greek coast with their cities and who had 
built walls so big and so heavy and so strong that the Greeks 
called them the work of the Titans, those godlike giants who 
in very olden days had used to play ball with mountain peaks. 

A careful study of these many relics has done away with 
some of the romantic features of the story. The makers of 
these early works of art and the builders of these strong fort¬ 
resses were no sorcerers, but simple sailors and traders. They 
had lived in Crete and on the many small islands of the Aegean 


MYCEN7E, IN ARGOLIS 








46 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Sea. They had been hardy mariners and had turned the 
.ZEgean into a center of commerce for the exchange of goods 
between the highly civilized East and the slowly developing 
wilderness of the European mainland. 



THE AEGEAN SEA 


For more than a thousand years they had maintained an 
island empire which had developed a very high form of art. 
Indeed their most important city, Cnossos, on the northern 
coast of Crete, had been entirely modern in its insistence upon 
hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly drained 
and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians 
had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto 
unknown bathtub. The palace of their king had been famous 
for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The 
cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain 
and the olive oil were stored, had been so vast and had so 
greatly impressed the first Greek visitors that they had given 
rise to the story of the “labyrinth.” This name we give to a 











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THE ISLAND BRIDGES BETWEEN ASIA AND EUROPE 




































48 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


structure with so many complicated passages that it is almost 
impossible to find our way out, once the front door has closed 
upon our frightened selves. 

But what finally became of this great iEgean Empire and 
what caused its sudden downfall, that I cannot tell. 

The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no 
one has yet been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their 
history therefore is unknown to us. We have to reconstruct 
the record of their adventures from the ruins which the 
iEgeans have left behind. These ruins make it clear that the 
Aegean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilized race 
which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe. 
Unless we are very much mistaken, the barbarians who were 
responsible for the destruction of the Cretan and the .ZEgean 
civilization were none other than certain tribes of wandering 
shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky penin¬ 
sula between the Adriatic and the iEgean seas and who are 
known to us as Greeks. 


THE GREEKS 


The Pyramids were a thousand years old and were begin¬ 
ning to show the first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the 
wise king of Babylon, had been dead and buried several cen- 



AN AEGEAN CITY ON THE GREEK MAINLAND 


turies, when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along 
the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in 
search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, 
after Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According 


49 





























50 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


to the old myths these were the only two human beings who 
had escaped the great flood which countless years before had 
destroyed all the people of the world, when they had grown 
so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty god who lived 
on Mount Olympus. 

Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, 
the historian of the fall of Athens, describing his earliest an- 



THE ACHyEANS TAKE AN yEGEAN CITY 


cestors, said that they “did not amount to very much,” and 
this was probably true. They were very ill-mannered. They 
lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild 
dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little respect 
for other people’s rights, they killed the natives of the Greek 
peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole their 
farms and took their cattle and made their wives and daugh¬ 
ters slaves. They wrote endless songs praising the courage 
of the clan of the Achaeans, who had led the Hellenic advance 
guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponnesus. 

But they did not attack the iEgeans, whose castles they 
saw, for they feared the metal swords and the spears of the 



































THE GREEKS 


51 


iEgean soldiers and knew that they could not hope to defeat 
them with their clumsy stone axes. 

For many centuries they continued to wander from valley 
to valley and from mountainside to mountainside. Then the 
whole of the land had been occupied and the migration had 
come to an end. 

That moment was the beginning of Greek civilization. The 
Greek farmer, living within sight of the .ZEgean colonies, was 



THE FALL OF CNOSSOS 


finally driven by curiosity to visit his haughty neighbors. He 
discovered that he could learn many useful things from the 
men who dwelt behind the high stone walls of Mycenae and 
Tiryns. 

He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered 
the art of handling those strange iron weapons which the 
iEgeans had brought from Babylon and from Thebes. He 
came to understand the mysteries of navigation. He began 
to build little boats for his own use. 

And when he had learned everything the iEgeans could 
teach him he turned upon his teachers and drove them back 
to their islands. Soon afterward he ventured forth upon the 















52 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


sea and conquered all the cities of the iEgean. Finally in the 
fifteenth century before our era he plundered and ravaged 
Cnossos. Troy, the last great commercial stronghold of the 
older civilization, was destroyed in the eleventh century b.c. 
Ten centuries after their first appearance upon the scene the 
Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece, of the ADgean, 
and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor. European history 
was to begin in all seriousness. 


THE GREEK CITIES 


We modern people love the sound of the word “big.” We 
pride ourselves upon the fact that we belong to the “biggest” 
country in the world and possess the “biggest” navy and grow 
the “biggest” oranges and potatoes, and we love to live in 
cities of “millions” of inhabitants, and when we are dead we 
are buried in the “biggest cemetery of the whole state.” 

A citizen of ancient Greece, could he have heard us talk, 
would not have known what we meant. “Moderation in all 
things” was the ideal of his life and mere bulk did not impress 
him at all. And this love of moderation was not merely a 
hollow phrase used upon special occasions; it influenced the 
lives of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the hour of 
their death. It was part of their literature and it made them 
build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the 
clothes which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets 
of their wives. It followed the crowds that went to the thea¬ 
ter and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to 
sin against the iron law of good taste or good sense. 

The Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their poli¬ 
ticians and in their most popular athletes. When a powerful 
runner came to Sparta and boasted that he could stand longer 
on one foot than any other man in Hellas, the people drove him 
from the city, because he prided himself upon an accomplish¬ 
ment at which he could be beaten by any common goose. 

“That is all very well,” you will say, “and no doubt it is a 
great virtue to care so much for moderation and perfection, 


53 







54 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


but why should the Greeks have been the only people to de¬ 
velop this quality in olden times?” For an answer I shall 
point to the way in which the Greeks lived. 

The people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the “sub¬ 
jects” of a mysterious supreme ruler who lived miles and 



MOUNT OLYMPUS, WHERE THE GODS LIVED 


miles away in a dark palace and who was rarely seen by the 
masses of the population. The Greeks, on the other hand, 
were “free citizens” of a hundred independent little “cities,” 
the largest of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large 
modern town. When a peasant who lived in Ur said that he 
was a Babylonian, he meant that he was one of millions of 
people who paid tribute to the king who at that particular 
moment happened to be master of western Asia. But when 
a Greek said proudly that he was an Athenian or a Theban, 
he spoke of a small town which was both his home and his 
country and which recognized no master but the will of the 
people in the market place. 








THE GREEK CITIES 


55 


To the Greek, his fatherland was the place where he was 
born; where he had spent his earliest years playing hide and 
seek amidst the forbidden rocks of the Acropolis; where he had 
grown into manhood with a thousand other boys and girls, 
whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your own 
schoolmates. His fatherland was the holy soil where his father 
and mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high 
city walls where his wife and children lived in safety. It was 
a complete world which perhaps covered no more than four or 
five square miles of rocky land. Don’t you see how these sur¬ 
roundings must have influenced a man in everything he did and 
said and thought? The people of Babylon and Assyria and 
Egypt had been part of the vast mob. They had been lost in 
the multitude. The Greek, on the other hand, had never lost 
touch with his immediate surroundings. He never ceased to 
be part of a little town where everybody knew everyone else. 
He felt that his intelligent neighbors were watching him. 
Whatever he did, whether he wrote plays or made statues out 
of marble or composed songs, he remembered that his efforts 
were going to be judged by all the free-born citizens of his 
home town who knew about such things. This knowledge 
forced him to strive after perfection; and perfection, as he 
had been taught from childhood, was not possible without 
moderation. 

In this hard school the Greeks learned to excel in many 
things. They created new forms of government and new forms 
of literature and new ideals in art which we have never been 
able to surpass. They performed these miracles in little vil¬ 
lages that covered less ground than a few modern city blocks. 

And look, what finally happened! 

In the fourth century before our era, Alexander of Mace¬ 
donia conquered the world. As soon as he had done with 
fighting, Alexander decided that he must bestow the benefits 
of the true Greek genius upon all mankind. He took it away 
from the little cities and the little villages and tried to make 
it blossom and bear fruit amidst the vast royal residences of 
his newly acquired empire. But the Greeks, removed from 


56 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the familiar sight of their own temples, removed from the well- 
known sounds and smells of their own crooked streets, at once 
lost the cheerful joy and the marvelous sense of moderation 
which had inspired the work of their hands and brains while 
they labored for the glory of their old city-states. They be¬ 
came cheap artisans, content with second-rate work. The day 
the little city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and 
were forced to become part of a big nation, the old Greek spirit 
died. And it has been dead ever since. 


GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 


In the beginning, all the Greeks had been equally rich and 
equally poor. Every man had owned a certain number of 
cows and sheep. His mud hut had been his castle. He had 
been free to come and go as he wished. Whenever.it was nec¬ 
essary to discuss matters of public importance, all the citizens 
had gathered in the market place. One of the older men of the 
village was elected chairman and it was his duty to see that 
everybody had a chance to express his views. In case of war, 
a particularly energetic and self-confident villager was chosen 
commander-in-chief, but the same people who had voluntarily 
given this man the right to be their leader claimed an equal 
right to deprive him of his job, once the danger had been 
averted. 

But gradually the village had grown into a city. Some 
people had worked hard and others had been lazy. A few 
had been unlucky, and still others had been just plain dishon¬ 
est in dealing with their neighbors and had gathered wealth. 
As a result, the city no longer consisted of a number of men 
who were equally well off. On the contrary it was inhabited 
by a small class of very rich people and a large class of very 
poor ones. 

There had been another change. The old commander-in¬ 
chief who had been willingly recognized as “head man” or 
“king,” because he knew how to lead his men to victory, had 
disappeared from the scene. His place had been taken by the 


57 







58 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


nobles—a class of rich people who during the course of time 
had got hold of a large share of the farms and estates. 

These nobles enjoyed many advantages over the common 
crowd of freemen. They were able to buy the best weapons 
that were to be found on the market of the eastern Mediter¬ 
ranean. They had much spare time in which they could prac- 



A GREEK CITY-STATE 


tice the art of fighting. They lived in strongly built houses 
and could hire soldiers to fight for them. They were con¬ 
stantly quarreling among themselves to decide who should 
rule the city. The victorious nobleman then assumed a sort of 
kingship over all his neighbors and governed the town until 
he in turn was killed or driven away by still another ambitious 
nobleman. 

Such a king, by the grace of his soldiers, was called a 
“tyrant.” During the seventh and sixth centuries before 
our era most Greek cities were for a time ruled by such tyrants, 
many of whom, by the way, happened to be exceedingly capa¬ 
ble men. But in the long run this state of affairs became un¬ 
bearable. Then attempts were made to bring about reforms, 
and out of these reforms grew the first democratic government 
of which the world has a record. 





















GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 


59 


It was early in the seventh century that the people of 
Athens decided to do some housecleaning and give the large 
number of freemen once more a voice in the government as 
they were supposed to have had in the days of their Achaean 
ancestors. They asked a man by the name of Draco to pro¬ 
vide them with a set of laws that would protect the poor against 
the aggressions of the rich. Draco set to work. Unfortu¬ 
nately he was a professional lawyer and very much out of touch 
with ordinary life. In his eyes a crime was a crime, and when 
he had finished his code the people of Athens discovered that 
these Draconian laws were so severe that they could not pos¬ 
sibly be put into effect. There would not have been rope 
enough to hang all the criminals under their new system, which 
made the stealing of an apple a capital offense. 

The Athenians looked about for a more humane reformer. 
At last they found someone who could do that sort of thing 
better than anybody else. His name was Solon. He belonged 
to a noble family and he had traveled all over the world and 
had studied the forms of government of many other countries. 
After a careful study of the subject, Solon gave Athens a set 
of laws which bore testimony to that wonderful principle of 
moderation which was part of the Greek character. He tried 
to improve the condition of the peasant without, however, de¬ 
stroying the prosperity of the nobles who were (or rather who 
could be) of such great service to the state as soldiers. To pro¬ 
tect the poorer classes against abuse on the part of the judges 
(who were always elected from the class of the nobles, because 
they received no salary), Solon made a provision whereby a 
citizen with a grievance had the right to state his case before 
a jury of thirty of his fellow Athenians. 

Most important of all, Solon forced the average freeman 
to take a direct and personal interest in the affairs of the city. 
No longer could he stay at home and say, “Oh, I am too busy 
to-day,” or, “It is raining and I’d better stay indoors.” He 
was expected to do his share; to be at the meeting of the town 
council; and to carry part of the responsibility for the safety 
and prosperity of the state. 


60 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


This government by the “demos,” the people, was often far 
from successful. There was too much idle talk. There were 
too many hateful and spiteful scenes between rivals for official 
honor. But it taught the Greek people to be independent and 
to rely upon themselves for their salvation, and that was a very 
good thing. 


GREEK LIFE 


But how, you will ask, did the ancient Greeks have time 
to look after their families and their business if they were 
forever running to the market place to discuss affairs of state? 
In this chapter I shall tell you. 

In all matters of government, the Greek democracy recog¬ 
nized only one class of citizens—the freeman. Every Greek 
city was composed of a small number of free-born citizens, a 
large number of slaves, and a sprinkling of foreigners. 

At rare intervals (usually during a war, when men were 
needed for the army) the Greeks showed themselves willing to 
confer the rights of citizenship upon the “barbarians,” as they 
called the foreigners. But this was an exception. Citizenship 
was a matter of birth. You were an Athenian, because your 
father and your grandfather had been Athenians before you. 
But however great your merits as a trader or a soldier, if you 
were horn of non-Athenian parents you remained a “for¬ 
eigner” until the end of time. 

The Greek city, therefore, whenever it was not ruled by a 
king or a tyrant, was run by and for the freemen. This 
would not have been possible without a large army of slaves, 
who outnumbered the free citizens at the rate of five or six 
to one and who performed those tasks to which we modern 
people must devote most of our time and energy if we wish to 
provide for our families and pay the rent of our apartments. 

The slaves did all the cooking and baking and candlestick 
making of the entire city. They were the tailors and the car- 


61 








62 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


penters and the jewelers and the school teachers and the book¬ 
keepers. They tended the store and looked after the factory 
while the master went to the public meeting to discuss ques¬ 
tions of war and peace, or visited the theater to see the latest 
play of iEschylus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary ideas 
of Euripides, who had dared to express certain doubts upon 
the omnipotence of the great god Zeus. 

Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modern club. All the 
free-born citizen were hereditary members and all the slaves 
were hereditary servants, who waited upon the needs of their 
masters. It was very pleasant to be a member of the or¬ 
ganization. 

But when we talk about slaves, we do not mean the sort of 
people about whom you have read in the pages of “Uncle 
Tom’s Cabin.” It is true that the position of those slaves who 
tilled the fields was a very unpleasant one, but the average 
freeman who had come down in the world, and who had been 
obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand, led just as miser¬ 
able a life. In the cities, furthermore, many of the slaves were 
more prosperous than the poorer classes of the freemen. For 
the Greeks, who loved moderation in all things, did not like to 
treat their slaves after the fashion which afterward was so 
common in Rome, where a slave had as few rights as an engine 
in a modern factory and could be thrown to the wild animals 
upon the smallest pretext. 

The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution, 
without which no city could possibly become the home of a 
truly civilized people. 

The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are 
performed by the business men and the professional men. As 
for those household duties which take up so much of the time 
of your mother and which, worry your father when he comes 
home from his office, the Greeks, who understood the value of 
leisure, had reduced such duties to the smallest possible mini¬ 
mum by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity. 

To begin with, their homes were very plain. Even the rich 
nobles spent their lives in a sort of adobe barn, which lacked 



THE TEMPLE 




































64 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


all the comforts which a modern workman expects as his natu¬ 
ral right. A Greek home consisted of four walls and a roof. 
There was a door which led into the street, hut there were no 
windows. The kitchen, the living rooms, and the sleeping quar¬ 
ters were built around an open courtyard in which there was a 
small fountain, or a statue and a few plants, to make it look 
bright. Within this courtyard the family lived when it did not 
rain or when it was not too cold. In one corner of the vard the 
cook (who was a slave) prepared the meal; in another 
corner the teacher (who was also a slave) taught the children 
the alpha beta gamma and the tables of multiplication; in 
still another corner the lady of the house, who rarely left her 
domain (since it was not considered good form for a married 
woman to be seen on the street too often), was repairing her 
husband’s clothing with her seamstresses (who were slaves) ; in 
the little office, right off the door, the master was inspecting 
the accounts which the overseer of his farm (who was a slave) 
had just brought to him. 

When dinner was ready the family came together, but the 
meal was a very simple one and did not take much time. The 
Greeks seem to have regarded eating as an unavoidable evil 
and not a pastime, which kills many dreary hours and eventu¬ 
ally kills many dreary people. They lived on bread and on 
wine, with a little meat and some green vegetables. They 
drank water only when nothing else was available, because 
they did not think it very healthful. They loved to call on each 
other for dinner; but our idea of a festive meal, where every¬ 
body is supposed to eat much more than is good for him, would 
have disgusted them. They came together at the table for 
the purpose of a good talk and a good glass of wine and water, 
but as they were moderate neople they despised those who 
drank too much. 

The same simplicity which prevailed in the dining room 
also dominated their choice of clothes. They liked to be clean 
and well groomed, to have their hair and beards neatly cut, 
to feel their bodies strong with the exercise and the swimming 
of the gymnasium, but they never followed the Asiatic fashion 


GREEK LIFE 


65 


which prescribed loud colors and strange patterns. They 
wore long white coats and they managed to look as smart as 
a modern Italian officer in his long blue cape. 

They loved to see their wives wear ornaments but they 
thought it very vulgar to display their wealth (or their wives) 
in public; and whenever the women left their home they were 
as inconspicuous as possible. 

In short, the story of Greek life is a story not only of mod¬ 
eration but also of simplicity. “Tilings,” chairs and tables and 
books and houses and carriages, are apt to take up a great 
deal of their owner’s time. In the end they invariably make 
him their slaves and his hours are spent looking after their 
wants, keeping them polished and brushed and painted. The 
Greeks, before everything else, wanted to be “free,” both in 
mind and in body. That they might maintain their liberty, and 
be truly free in spirit, they reduced their daily needs to the 
lowest possible point. 


THE GREEK THEATER 


At a very early stage of their history the Greeks had be¬ 
gun to collect the poems which had been written in honor of 
their brave ancestors who had driven the Pelasgians out of 
Hellas and had destroyed the power of Troy. These poems were 
recited in public and everybody came to listen to them. But 
the theater, the form of entertainment which has become almost 
a necessary part of our own lives, did not grow out of these 
recited heroic tales. It had such a curious origin that I must 
tell you something about it in a separate chapter. 

The Greeks had always been fond of parades. Every 
year they held solemn processions in honor of Dionysos the 
god of the wine. As everybody in Greece drank wine (the 
Greeks thought water useful only for swimming and sailing), 
this particular Divinity was as popular as a god of the soda- 
fountain would be in our own land. 

And because the Wine-God was supposed to live in the 
vineyards, amidst a merry mob of Satyrs (strange creatures 
who were half man and half goat), the crowd that joined the 
procession used to wear goatskins and to hee-haw like real 
billy-goats. The Greek word for goat is “tragos” and the 
Greek word for singer is “oidos.” The singer who meh-mehed 
like a goat therefore was called a “tragoidos” or goat singer, 
and it is this strange name which developed into the modern 
word “Tragedy,” which means in the theatrical sense a piece 
with an unhappy ending, just as Comedy (which realty means 




66 











THE GREEK THEATER 


67 


the singing of something <f comos” or gay) is the name given 
to a play which ends happily. 

But how, you will ask, did this noisy chorus of masquer¬ 
aders, stamping around like wild goats, ever develop into the 
noble tragedies which have filled the theaters of the world for 
more than two thousand years? 

The connecting link between the goat-singer and Hamlet is 
really very simple, as I shall show you in a moment. 

The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and 
attracted large crowds of spectators, who stood along the side 
of the road and laughed. But soon this business of hee-hawing 
grew tiresome, and the Greeks thought dullness an evil only 
comparable to ugliness or sickness. They asked for some¬ 
thing more entertaining. 'Then an inventive young poet from 
a village in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a tre¬ 
mendous success. He made one of the members of the goat- 
chorus step forward and engage in conversation with the leader 
of the musicians who marched at the head of the parade 
playing upon their pipes of Pan. This individual was al¬ 
lowed to step out of line. He waved his arms and gesticulated 
while he spoke (that is to say, he “acted” while the others merely 
stood by and sang) and asked a lot of questions, which the 
bandmaster answered according to the roll of papyrus upon 
which the poet had written down the answers before the show 
began. 

This rough and ready conversation—the dialogue—which 
told the story of Dionysos or one of the other gods, became 
at once popular with the crowd. Henceforth every Diony¬ 
sian procession had an “acted scene” and very soon the “acting” 
was considered more important than the procession and the 
meh-mehing. 

iEschylus, the most successful of all “tragedians,” who 
wrote no less than eighty plays during his long life (from 526 
to 455 b.c.), made a bold step forward when he introduced 
two “actors” instead of one. A generation later Sophocles 
increased the number of actors to three. When Euripides be¬ 
gan to write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the filth 




68 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


century b.c., he was allowed as many actors as he liked. When 
Aristophanes wrote his famous comedies in which he poked fun 
at everybody and everything, including the gods of Mount 
Olympus, the chorus had been reduced to the role of mere by¬ 
standers who were lined up behind the principal performers 
and who sang “this is a terrible world” while the hero in the 
foreground committed a crime against the will of the gods. 

This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a 
proper setting, and soon every Greek city owned a theater, 
cut out of the rock of a near-by hill. The spectators sat upon 
wooden benches and faced a wide circle (our present orches¬ 
tra where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for a seat). 
Upon this half-circle, which was the stage, the actors and the 
chorus took their stand. Behind them there was a tent where 
they made up with large clay masks which hid their faces and 
which showed the spectators whether the actors were supposed 
to be happy and smiling or unhappy and weeping. The Greek 
word for tent is “skene,” and that is the reason why we talk 
of the “scenery” of the stage. 

When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life, the 
people took it very seriously and never went to the theater to 
give their minds a vacation. A new play became as impor¬ 
tant an event as an election and a successful playwright was 
received with greater honors than those bestowed upon a gen¬ 
eral who had just returned from a famous victory. 


t 


THE PERSIAN WARS 


The Greeks had learned the art of trading from the 
iEgeans, who had been the pupils of the Phoenicians. They 
had founded colonies after the Phoenician pattern. They had 
even improved upon the Phoenician methods by a more general 
use of money in dealing with foreign customers. In the sixth 
century before our era they had established themselves firmly 
along the coast of Asia Minor and were taking away trade 
from the Phoenicians at a fast rate. This the Phoenicians 
of course did not like, but they were not strong enough to 
risk a war with their Greek competitors. They sat and waited, 
nor did they wait in vain. 

In a former chapter, I have told you how a humble tribe 
of Persian shepherds had suddenly gone upon the warpath and 
had conquered the greater part of western Asia. The Per¬ 
sians were too civilized to plunder their new subjects. They 
contented themselves with a yearly tribute. When they 
reached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek 
colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian kings as their over- 
lords and pay them a stipulated tax. The Greek colonies 
objected. The Persians insisted. Then the Greek colonies 
appealed to the home country and the stage was set for a 
quarrel. 

For, if the truth be told, the Persian kings regarded the 
Greek city-states as very dangerous political institutions and 
bad examples for all other people who were supposed to be the 
kings’ patient slaves. 


69 







70 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety 
because their country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the 
Aegean. But here their old enemies, the Phoenicians, stepped 
forward with offers of help and advice to the Persians. If the 
Persian king would provide the soldiers, the Phoenicians would 
guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to carry them to 



THE PERSIAN FLEET IS DESTROYED NEAR MOUNT ATHOS 


Europe. It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ, and 
Asia made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe. 

As a final warning the King of Persia sent messengers 
to the Greeks asking for “earth and water” as a token of their 
submission. The Greeks promptly threw the messengers into 
the nearest well, where they would find both “earth and water” 
in large abundance. Thereafter, of course, peace was impos¬ 
sible. 

But the gods of high Olympus watched over their chil¬ 
dren. When the Phoenician fleet carrying the Persian troops 
was near Mount Athos, the Storm-God blew his cheeks until 
he almost hurst the veins of his brow, and the fleet was de¬ 
stroyed by a terrible hurricane and the Persians were all 
drowned. 















THE PERSIAN WARS 


71 


Two years later more Persians came. This time they 
sailed across the iEgean Sea and landed near the village of 
Marathon. As soon as the Athenians heard this they sent 
their army of ten thousand men to guard the hills that sur¬ 
rounded the Marathonian plain. At the same time they dis- 



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THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 


patched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help. But Sparta 
was envious of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her 
assistance. The other Greek cities followed her example with 
the exception of tiny Plataea, which sent a thousand men. On 
the twelfth of September of the year 490, Miltiades, the Athe¬ 
nian commander, threw this little army against the hordes of 
the Persians. The Greeks broke through the Persian barrage of 
arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the disor¬ 
ganized Asiatic troops, who had never been called upon to re¬ 
sist such an enemy. 

That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow 
red with the flames of burning ships. Anxiously they waited 
for news. At last a little cloud of dust appeared upon the 



















72 THE STORY OF MANKIND 

road that led to the north. It was Pheidippides, the runner. 
Pie stumbled and gasped, for his end was near. Only a few 
days before had he returned from his errand to Sparta. He 
had hastened to join Miltiades. That morning he had taken 
part in the attack, and later he had volunteered to carry the 
news of victory to his beloved city. The people saw him fall 
and they rushed forward to support him. “We have won,” 
he whispered, and then he died, a glorious death which made 
him envied by all men. 

As for the Persians, they tried, after this defeat, to land 
near Athens, but they found the coast guarded and disap¬ 
peared, and once more the land of Hellas was at peace. 

Eight years the Persians waited and during this time the 
Greeks were not idle. They knew that a final attack was to be 
expected, but they did not agree upon the best way to avert the 
danger. Some people wanted to increase the army. Others 
said that a strong fleet was necessary for success. The two 
Athenian parties led by Aristides (for the army) and The- 
mistocles (the leader of the bigger-navy men) fought eacli other 
bitterly and nothing was done until Aristides was exiled. Then 

Themistocles had his chance and 
he built all the ships he could and 
turned the Piraeus into a strong 
naval base. 

In the year 481 B.c. a tremen¬ 
dous Persian army appeared in 
Thessaly, in the north of Greece. 
In this hour of danger, Sparta, 
the great military city of Greece, 
was elected commander-in- 
chief. But the Spartans cared 
little what happened to northern 
Greece provided their own coun¬ 
try was safe. They neglected to 
fortify the passes that led into 
Greece. 

A small detachment of Spar- 



THERMOPYLAE 





THE PERSIAN WARS 


73 


tans under Leonidas had been told to guard the narrow road 
between the high mountains and the sea which connected Thes¬ 
saly with the southern provinces. Leonidas obeyed his orders. 
He fought and held the pass with unequaled bravery. But a 
traitor by the name of Ephialtes who knew the little byways 
of Melis guided a regiment of Persians through the hills and 
made it possible for them to attack Leonidas in the rear. Near 
the Warm Wells—the Thermopylae—a terrible battle was 
fought. When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers 
lay dead under the corpses of their enemies. 

But the pass had been lost, and the greater part of Greece 
fell into the hands of the Persians. They marched upon 
Athens, threw the garrison from the rocks of the Acropolis, 
and burned the city. The people fled to the Island of Salamis. 
All seemed lost. But on the 20th of September of the year 480 
Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the 
narrow straits which separated Salamis from the mainland. 



THE PERSIANS BURN ATHENS 





















74 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Within a few hours he destroyed three quarters of the Persian 
ships. 

In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught. 
Xerxes was forced to retire. The next year, so he decreed, 
would bring a final decision. He took his troops to Thessaly 
and there waited for spring. 

But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of 
the hour. The}" left the safe shelter of the wall which they had 
built across the Isthmus of Corinth and under the leadership 
of Pausanias they marched against Mardonius, the Persian 
general. The united Greeks (some one hundred thousand men 
from a dozen different cities) attacked the three hundred thou¬ 
sand men of the enemy near Plataea. Once more the heavy 
Greek infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows. 
The Persians were defeated, as they had been at Marathon, 
and this time they left for good. By a strange coincidence, the 
same day the Greek armies won their victory near Plataea, 
the Athenian ships destroyed the enemy’s fleet near Cape My- 
cale in Asia Minor. 

Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end. 
Athens had covered herself with glory and Sparta had fought 
bravely and well. If these two cities had been able to come to 
an agreement, if they had been willing to forget their little 
jealousies, they might have become the leaders of a strong and 
united Hellas. 

But alas, they allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm 
to slip by, and the opportunity never returned. 


ATHENS vs. SPARTA 



Athens and Sparta were both Greek cities and their people 
spoke a common language. In every other respect they were 
different. Athens rose high from the plain. It was a city 
exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea, willing to look at 
the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on the other 
hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the 
surrounding mountains as a harrier against foreign thought. 
Athens was a city of busy trade. Sparta was an armed camp 
where people were soldiers for the sake of being soldiers. The 
people of Athens loved to sit in the sun and discuss poetry or 
listen to the wise words of a philosopher. The Spartans, on the 
other hand, never wrote anything very important either in 
poetry or in prose, but they knew how to fight, they liked to 
fight, and they sacrificed all human emotions to their ideal of 
military j^reparedness. 

No wonder that the sombre Spartans viewed the success 
of Athens with malicious hate. The energy which the defence 
of the common home had developed in Athens was now used 
for purposes of a more peaceful nature. The Acropolis was re¬ 
built and was made into a marble shrine to the goddess Athena. 
Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, sent far and 
wide to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists to 
make the city more beautiful and the young Athenians more 
worthy of their home. At the same time he kept a watchful 
eye on Sparta and built high walls which connected Athens 
with the sea and made her the strongest fortress of that day. 


75 








76 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led 
to the final conflict. For thirty years the war between Athens 
and Sparta continued. It ended in a terrible disaster for 
Athens. 

During the third year of the war the plague had entered 
the city. More than half the people, including Pericles, the 
great leader, had been killed. The plague was followed by a 
period of bad and untrustworthy leadership. A brilliant young 
fellow by the name of Alcibiades had gained the favor of the 
popular assembly. He suggested a raid upon the Spartan 
colony of Syracuse in Sicily. An expedition was equipped and 
everything was ready. But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street 
brawl and was forced to flee. The general who succeeded him 
was a bungler. First he lost his ships and then he lost his 
army, and the few surviving Athenians were thrown into the 
stone-quarries of Syracuse, where they died from hunger and 
thirst. 

The expedition had killed all the young men of Athens. 
The city was doomed. After a long siege the town surrendered 
in April of the year 404 b.c. The high walls were demolished. 
The navy was taken away by the Spartans. Athens ceased to 
exist as the center of the great colonial empire which it had 
conquered during the days of its prosperity. But that won¬ 
derful desire to learn and to know and to investigate which 
had distinguished her free citizens during the days of greatness 
and prosperity did not perish with the walls and the ships. 
It continued to live. It became even more brilliant. 

Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece. 
But now, as the home of the first great university, the city be¬ 
gan to influence the minds of intelligent people far beyond 
the narrow frontiers of Hellas. 



, 


ALEXANDER THE GREAT 


When the Achaeans had left their homes along the banks of 
the Danube to look for pastures new, they had spent some 
time among the moutains of Macedonia. Ever since, the 
Greeks had maintained certain more or less formal relations 
with the people of this northern country. The Macedonians 
from their side had kept themselves well informed about con¬ 
ditions in Greece. 

Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had fin¬ 
ished their disastrous war for the leadership of Hellas, that 
Macedonia was ruled by an extraordinarily clever man by the 
name of Philip. He admired the Greek spirit in letters and 
art, but he despised the Greek lack of self-control in political 
affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly good people waste 
its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the 
difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece. Then 
he asked his new subjects to join him on a visit which he 
meant to pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes 
had paid the Greeks one hundred and fifty years before. 

Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start 
upon his well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the 
destruction of Athens was left to Philip’s son Alexander, the 
beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest of all Greek teachers. 

Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the 
year 334 b.c. Seven years later he reached India. In the 
meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek 
merchants. Pie had conquered Egypt and had been worshiped 


77 








GREECE 
















ALEXANDER THE GREAT 


79 


by the people of the Nile Valley as the son and heir of the 
Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king; he had 
overthrown the Persian Empire; he had given orders to re¬ 
build Babylon; he had led his troops into the heart of the 
Himalaya Mountains and had made the entire world a Mace¬ 
donian province and dependency. Then he stopped and an¬ 
nounced even more ambitious plans. 

The newly formed empire must be brought under the influ¬ 
ence of the Greek mind. The people must be taught the Greek 
language—they must live in cities built after a Greek model. 
The Alexandrian soldier now turned schoolmaster. The mili¬ 
tary camps of yesterday became the peaceful centers of the 
newly imported Greek civilization. Higher and higher did the 
flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise. Suddenly 
Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old palace 
of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323. 

Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile 
clay of a higher civilization. Alexander, with all his childish 
ambitions and his silly vanities, had performed a most valuable 
service. His empire did not long survive him. A number of 
ambitious generals divided the territory among themselves. 
But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world 
brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge. 

They maintained their independence until the Romans 
added western Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The 
strange inheritance of this Hellenistic civilization (part Greek, 
part Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fell to the 
Roman conquerors. During the following centuries, it got 
such a firm hold upon the Roman world that we feel its in¬ 
fluence in our own lives this very day. 


A SUMMARY 




Thus far, from the top of our high tower we have been 
looking eastward. But from this time on, the history of Egypt 
and Mesopotamia is going to grow less interesting and I must 
take you to study the western landscape. 

Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to 
ourselves what we have seen. 

First of all I showed you prehistoric man—a creature very 
simple in his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I 
told you how he was the most defenseless of the many animals 
that roamed through the early wilderness of the five continents, 
but, being possessed of a larger and better brain, he managed 
to hold his own. 

Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold 
weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was 
obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished 
to survive. Since, however, that “wish to survive” was (and is) 
the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to 
the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to 
work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people man¬ 
age to exist through the long cold spells which killed many 
ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and com¬ 
fortable once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of 
things which gave him such great advantages over his less in¬ 
telligent neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very serious 
one during the first half-million years of man’s residence upon 
this planet) became a very remote one. 


80 









A SUMMARY 


81 


I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly 
plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not 
well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile 
rushed ahead and created the first center of civilization. 

Then I showed you Mesopotamia, “the land between the 
rivers,” which was the second great school of the human race. 
And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the zEgean 
Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old 
East to the young West, where lived the Greeks. 

Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe called the Hel¬ 
lenes, who thousands of years before had left the heart of 
Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed 
their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since 
then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I told 
you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states, 
where the civilization of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured 
into something quite new, something that was much nobler and 
finer than anything that had gone before. 

By this time civilization has described a semicircle. It be¬ 
gins in Egypt and Mesopotamia and moves westward by way 
of the iEgean islands until it reaches the European continent. 
The first four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and 
Phoenicians and other Semitic tribes (please remember that the 
Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples) have 
carried the torch that was to illuminate the world. They now 
hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who become the 
teachers of another Indo-European tribe called the Romans. 
But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward along the 
northern coast of Africa and have made themselves the rulers 
of the western half of the Mediterranean'just when the east¬ 
ern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession. 

This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible con¬ 
flict between the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises 
the victorious Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian- 
Mesopotamian-Greek civilization to the furthermost corners of 
the European continent, where it serves as the foundation upon 
which our modern society is based. 


82 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold 
of these few principles, the rest of our history will become a 
great deal simpler. The maps will make clear what the words 
fail to tell. And after this short intermission, we go back to 
our story and give you an account of the famous war between 
Carthage and Rome. 


( 


ROME AND CARTHAGE 


The little Phoenician trading post of Carthage stood on 
a low hill which overlooked the African Sea, a stretch of 
water ninety miles wide that separates Africa from Europe. 
It was an ideal spot for a commercial center. Almost too ideal. 
It grew too fast and became too rich. When, in the sixth cen¬ 
tury before our era, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed 
Tyre, Carthage broke off all further relations with the mother 
country and became an independent state—the great western 
advance-post of the Semitic races. 

Unfortunately the city had inherited many of the traits 
which for a thousand years had been characteristic of the 
Phoenicians. It was a vast business house, protected by a 
strong navy, indifferent to most of the finer aspects of life. 
The city and the surrounding country and the distant colonies 
were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group of 
rich men. The Greek word for rich is “ploutos,” and the 
Greeks called such a government by rich men a “plutocracy.” 
Carthage was a plutocracy. The real power of the state lay in 
the hands of a dozen big ship-owners and mine-owners and 
merchants who met in the back room of an office and regarded 
their common fatherland as a business enterprise which ought 
to yield them a decent profit. They were, however, wide awake 
and full of energy and worked very hard. 

As the years went by the influence of Carthage upon her 
neighbors increased until the greater part of the African 
coast, Spain, and certain regions of France were Carthaginian 


83 









84 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


possessions and paid tribute, taxes, and dividends to the mighty 
city on the African Sea. 

Of course, such a “plutocracy” was forever at the mercy of 
the crowd. As long as there was plenty of work and wages 
were high, the majority of the citizens were quite contented, 



CARTHAGE 


allowed their “betters” to rule them, and asked no embarrassing 
questions. But when no ships left the harbor, when no ore 
was brought to the smelting ovens, when dockworkers and 
stevedores were thrown out of employment, then there were 
grumblings, and there was a demand that the popular assembly 
be called together as in the olden days when Carthage had 
been a self-governing republic. 

To prevent such an occurrence the plutocracy was obliged 
to keep the business of the town going at full speed. It 
had managed to do this very successfully for almost five hun- 















ROME AND CARTHAGE 


85 


dred years when it was greatly disturbed by certain rumors 
which reached them from the western coast of Italy. It was 
said that a little village on the banks of the Tiber had sud¬ 
denly risen to great power and was making itself the acknowl¬ 
edged leader of all the Latin tribes, who inhabited central Italy. 


SPHERES OF INFLUENCE 



The 

CO pLI CTl rJC, 
<■ SpH CREj> 
OP 

influence 

DP 

\\ o m e 

A*.J> 

CAftTHACE . 


It was also said that this village, which, by the way, was called 
Rome, intended to build ships and go after the commerce of 
Sicily and the southern coast of France. 

Carthage could not possibly tolerate such competition. The 
young rival must be destroyed, lest the Carthaginian rulers 
lose their prestige as the absolute rulers of the western Medi¬ 
terranean. 

The rumors were duly investigated and in a general way 
these were the facts that came to light. 










86 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


The west coast of Italy had long been neglected by civili¬ 
zation. Whereas in Greece all the good harbors faced east¬ 
ward and enjoyed a full view of the busy islands of the Aegean, 
the west coast of Italy contemplated nothing more exciting 
than the desolate waves of the Mediterranean. The country 
was poor. It was therefore rarely visited by foreign merchants, 
and the natives were allowed to live in undisturbed possession 
of their hills and their marshy plains. 

The first serious invasion of this land came from the north. 
At an unknown date certain Indo-European tribes had man¬ 
aged to find their way through the passes of the Alps and had 
pushed southward until they had filled the heel and the toe of 
the famous Italian boot with their villages and their flocks. 
Of these early conquerors we know nothing. No Homer sang 
their glory. Their own accounts of the foundation of Rome 
(written eight hundred years later when the little city had be¬ 
come the center of an empire) are fairy stories and do not be¬ 
long in a history. Romulus and Remus jumping across each 
other’s walls (I always forget who jumped across whose wall) 
make entertaining reading, but the foundation of the city of 
Rome was a much more prosaic affair. Rome began as a thou¬ 
sand American cities have done, by being a convenient place 
for barter and liorse-trading. It lay in the heart of the plains 
of central Italy. The Tiber provided direct access to the sea. 
The land road from north to south found here a convenient 
ford which could be used all the year around. And seven little 
hills along the bank of the river offered the inhabitants a safe 
shelter against their enemies who lived in the mountains and 

ond the horizon of the near-by sea. 

The mountaineers were called the Sabines. They were a 
rough crowd with an unholy desire for easy plunder. But they 
were very backward. They used stone axes and wooden 
shields and were no match for the Romans with their steel 
swords. The sea people on the other hand were dangerous 
foes. They were called the Etruscans and they were (and 
still are) one of the great mysteries of history. Nobody knew 
(or knows) whence they came; who they were; what had driven 


those who lived bey 


Qot&. m rtre C/ry of Rons ha pj*& a /. 
X T+t e ACROSS T//e R/ubh 


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iTriTuiiui njtii ]Trr j^7n'' t WnwTrrnTT> *f wn “ 













XT TVS "Tocju^ //g^ 



HOW THE CITY OF ROME HAPPENED 



































88 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


them away from their original homes. We have found the re¬ 
mains of their cities and their cemeteries and their waterworks 
all along the Italian coast. We are familiar with their inscrip¬ 
tions. Blit as only one or two scholars have ever believed that 
they could decipher the Etruscan alphabet, and their trans¬ 
lations have not been accepted by other scholars, these written 
messages have so far merely piqued our curiosity. 

Most scholars believe that the Etruscans came originally 
from Asia Minor and that a great war or a pestilence in that 
country had forced them to go away and seek a new home else¬ 
where. Whatever the reason for their coming, the Etruscans 
played a great role in history. They carried the pollen of the 
ancient civilization from the east to the west and taught the 
Romans who, as we know, came from the north, the first prin¬ 
ciples of architecture and street-building and fighting and art 
and cookery and medicine and astronomy. 

But just as the Greeks had not loved their Aegean teachers, 
in this same way did the Romans hate their Etruscan masters. 
They got rid of them as soon as they could, and the oppor¬ 
tunity offered itself when Greek merchants discovered the 
commercial possibilities of Italy and when the first Greek 
vessels reached Rome. The Greeks came to trade, but they 
stayed to instruct. They found the tribes who inhabited the 
Roman countryside (and who were called the Latins) quite 
willing to learn such things as might be of practical use. At 
once they understood the great benefit that could be derived 
from a written alphabet and they copied that of the Greeks. 
They also understood the commercial advantages of a well- 
regulated system of coins and measures and weights. Eventu¬ 
ally the Romans swallowed Greek civilization hook, line, and 
sinker. 

They even welcomed the gods of the Greeks to their coun¬ 
try. Zeus was taken to Rome, where he became known as 
Jupiter, and the other divinities followed him. The Roman 
gods, however, never were quite like their cheerful cousins who 
had accompanied the Greeks on their road through life and 
through history. The Roman gods were state functionaries. 


ROME AND CARTHAGE 


89 


Each one managed his own department with great prudence 
and a deep sense of justice, but in turn he was exact in de¬ 
manding the obedience of his worshipers. This obedience the 
Romans rendered with scrupulous care. But they never es¬ 
tablished the cordial personal relations and that charming 
friendship which had existed between the old Hellenes and 
the mighty residents of the high Olympian peak. 

The Romans did not imitate the Greek form of govern¬ 
ment, but, as they were of the same Indo-European stock as the 
people of Hellas, the early history of Rome resembles that of 
Athens and the other Greek cities. They did not find it diffi- 
cult to get rid of their kings, the descendants of the ancient 
tribal chieftains. But once the kings had been driven from 
the city, the Romans were forced to bridle the power of the 
nobles, and it took many centuries before they managed to 
establish a system which gave every free citizen of Rome a 
chance to take a personal interest in the affairs of his town. 

Thereafter the Romans enjoyed one great advantage over 
the Greeks. They managed the affairs of their country with¬ 
out making too many speeches. They were less imaginative 
than the Greeks and preferred an ounce of action to a pound 
of words. They understood the tendency of the multitude 
(the “plebs,” as the assemblage of free citizens was called) 
only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They 
therefore placed the actual business of running the city into 
the hands of two “consuls,” who were assisted by a council of 
elders, called the senate (because the word “senex” means an 
old man). As a matter of custom and practical advantage the 
senators were elected from the nobility. But their power had 
been strictly defined. 

Rome at one time had passed through the same sort of 
struggle between the poor and the rich which had forced 
Athens to adopt the laws of Draco and Solon. In Rome this 
conflict had occurred in the fifth century b.c. As a result the 
freemen had obtained a written code of laws which protected 
them against the despotism of the aristocratic judges by the 
institution of the “tribune.” These tribunes were city magis- 


90 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


trates, elected by the freemen. They had the right to protect 
any citizen against those actions of the government officials 
which were thought to be unjust. A consul had the right to 
condemn a man to death, but if the case had not been abso¬ 
lutely proved the tribune could interfere and save the poor 
fellow’s life. 

But when I use the word Rome, I seem to refer to a little 
city of a few thousand inhabitants. And the real strength of 
Rome lav in the country districts outside her walls. And it 
was in the government of these outlying provinces that Rome 
at an early age showed her wonderful gift as a colonizing 
power. 

In very early times Rome had been the only strongly for¬ 
tified city in central Italy, but it had always offered a hospitable 
refuge to other Latin tribes who happened to be in danger of 
attack. The Latin neighbors had recognized the advantages 
of a close union with such a powerful friend and had tried to 
find a basis for some sort of defensive and offensive alliance. 
Other nations, Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, even 
Greeks, would have insisted upon a treaty of submission on the 
part of the “barbarians.” The Romans did nothing of the 
sort. They gave the “outsiders” a chance to become partners 
in a common “res publica,” or commonwealth. 

“You want to join us,” they said. “Very well, go ahead 
and join. We shall treat you as if you were full-fledged citi¬ 
zens of Rome. In return for this privilege we expect you to 
fight for our city, the mother of us all, whenever it shall be 
necessary.” 

The “outsiders” appreciated this generosity and showed 
their gratitude by their unswerving loyalty. 

Whenever a Greek city had been attacked, the foreign resi¬ 
dents had moved out as quickly as they could. Why defend 
something which meant nothing to them but a temporary 
boarding house in which they were tolerated as long as they 
paid their bills? But when the enemy was before the gates 
of Rome, all the Latins rushed to her defense. It was their 
mother who was in danger. It was their true “home,” even if 


ROME AND CARTHAGE 


91 


they lived a hundred miles away and had never seen the walls 
of the sacred hills. 

No defeat and no disaster could change this sentiment. In 
the beginning of the fourth century b.c. the wild Gauls forced 
their way into Italy. They had defeated the Roman army near 
the River Allia and had marched upon the city. They had 
taken Rome and then they expected that the people would 
come and sue for peace. They waited, but nothing happened. 
After a short time the Gauls found themselves surrounded by 
a hostile population which made it impossible for them to obtain 
supplies. After seven months, hunger forced them to with¬ 
draw. The policy of Rome to treat the “foreigner” on equal 
terms had proved a great success and Rome stood stronger than 
ever before. 

This short account of the early history of Rome shows you 
the enormous difference between the Roman ideal of a healthy 
state and that of the ancient world which was embodied in the 
town of Carthage. The Romans counted upon the cheerful 
and hearty cooperation between a number of “equal citizens.” 
The Carthaginians, following the example of Egypt and west¬ 
ern Asia, insisted upon the unreasoning (and therefore un¬ 
willing) obedience of “subjects,” and when these failed they 
hired professional soldiers to do their fighting for them. 

You will now understand why Carthage was bound to fear 
such a clever and powerful enemy and why the plutocracy of 
Carthage was only too willing to pick a quarrel that they might 
destroy the dangerous rival before it was too late. 

But the Carthaginians, being good business men, knew that 
it never pays to rush matters. They proposed to the Romans 
that their respective cities draw two circles on the map and 
that each town claim one of these circles as her own “sphere 
of influence” and promise to keep out of the other fellow’s cir¬ 
cle. The agreement was promptly made; it was broken just 
as promptly when both sides thought it wise to send their 
armies to Sicily, where a rich soil and a bad government in¬ 
vited foreign interference. 

The war which followed (the so-called first Punic War) 


92 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 



A FAST ROMAN WARSHIP 


lasted twenty-four } T ears. It was fought out on the high seas 
and in the beginning it seemed that the experienced Cartha¬ 
ginian navy would defeat the newly created Roman fleet. 
Following their ancient tactics, the Carthaginians would either 
ram the enemy vessels or by a bold attack from the side would 
break their oars and would then kill the sailors of the helpless 
vessel with arrows and with fire balls. Rut Roman engineers 
invented a new craft which carried a boarding bridge across 
which the Roman infantrymen stormed the hostile ship. Then 
there was a sudden end to Carthaginian victories. At the 
battle of Mylae their fleet was badly defeated. Carthage was 
obliged to sue for peace, and Sicily became part of the Roman 
domains. * 

Twenty-three years later new trouble arose. Rome (in 
quest of copper) had taken the island of Sardinia. Carthage 
(in quest of silver) thereupon occupied all of southern Spain. 
This made Carthage a direct neighbor of the Romans. The 
latter did not like this at all, and they ordered their troops to 
cross the Pyrenees and watch the Carthaginian army of occu¬ 
pation. 








ROME AND CARTHAGE 


93 


Everything was ready for the second outbreak between the 
two rivals. Once more a Greek colony was the pretext for a 
war. The Carthaginians were besieging Saguntum on the east 
coast of Spain. The Saguntians appealed to Rome, and Rome, 
as usual, was willing to help. The senate promised the help of 
the Latin armies, but the preparation for this expedition took 
some time, and meanwhile Saguntum had been taken and had 
been destroyed. This had been done in direct opposition to 
the will of Rome. The senate decided upon war. One Roman 
army was to cross the African Sea and make a landing on Car¬ 
thaginian soil. A second division was to keep the Carthaginian 
armies occupied in Spain to prevent them from rushing to the 
aid of the home town. It was an excellent plan and every¬ 
body expected a great victory. 

It was the fall of the year 218 before the birth of Christ, 
and the Roman army which was to attack the Carthaginians in 
Spain had left Italy. People were eagerly waiting for news of 
an easy and complete victory when a terrible rumor began to 
spread through the plain of the Po. Wild mountaineers, their 
lips trembling with fear, told of hundreds of thousands of 
brown men accompanied by strange beasts, “each one as big as 
a house,” who had suddenly emerged from the clouds of snow 
that surrounded the old Graian pass through which Hercules 
was said to have driven the oxen of Geryon on his way from 
Spain to Greece. Soon an endless stream of bedraggled refu¬ 
gees appeared before the gates of Rome with more complete 
details. Hannibal, with fifty thousand soldiers, nine thousand 
horsemen, and thirty-seven fighting elephants, had crossed the 
Py renees. He had defeated the Roman army of Scipio on 
the banks of the Rhone and had guided his army safely across 
the mountain passes of the Alps, although it was October and 
the roads were thickly covered with snow and ice. Then he 
had joined forces with the Gauls and together they had de¬ 
feated a second Roman army just before they crossed the 
Trebia and laid siege to Placentia, the northern terminus of 
the road which connected Rome with the province of the 
Alpine districts. 



HANNIBAL CROSSES THE ALPS 












ROME AND CARTHAGE 


95 


The senate, surprised but calm and energetic as usual, 
hushed up the news of these many defeats and sent two fresh 
armies to stop the invader. Hannibal managed to surprise 
these troops on a narrow road along the shores of the Trasi- 
mene Lake, and there he killed all the Roman officers and most 
of their men. This time there was a panic among the people 
of Rome, but the senate kept its nerve. A third army was 
organized and the command was given to Quintus Fabius Max¬ 
imus with full power to act “as was necessary to save the state.” 

Fabius knew that he must be very careful lest all be lost. 
His raw and untrained men, the last available soldiers, were 
no match for Hannibal’s veterans. He refused to accept battle 
but forever followed Hannibal, destroyed everything eatable, 
destroyed the roads, attacked small detachments, and gener¬ 
ally weakened the morale of the Carthaginian troops by a most 
distressing and annoying form of guerilla warfare. 

Such methods, however, did not satisfy the fearsome crowds 
who had found safety behind the walls of Rome. They wanted 
“action.” Something must be done and must be done quickly. 
A popular hero by the name of Varro, the sort of man who 
went about the city telling everybody how much better he could 
do things than slow old Fabius, the “Delayer,” was made com- 
mander-in-ehief by popular acclamation. At the battle of 
Cannae (216) he suffered the most terrible defeat of Roman 
history. More than seventy thousand men were killed. Han¬ 
nibal was master of all Italy. 

He marched from one end of the peninsula to the other, 
proclaiming himself the “deliverer from the yoke of Rome” 
and asking the different provinces to join him in warfare upon 
the mother city. Then once more the wisdom of Rome bore 
noble fruit. With the exceptions of Capua and Syracuse, all 
Roman cities remained loyal. Hannibal, the deliverer, found 
himself opposed by the people whose friend he pretended to be. 
He was far away from home and did not like the situation. 
He sent messengers to Carthage to ask for fresh supplies and 
new men. Alas, Carthage could not send him either. 

The Romans, with their boarding-bridges, were the mas- 


96 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


ters of the sea. Hannibal must help himself as best he could. 
He continued to defeat the Roman armies that were sent out 
against him, but his own numbers were decreasing rapidly and 
the Italian peasants held aloof from this self-appointed “de¬ 
liverer.” 

After many years of uninterrupted victories, Hannibal 
found himself besieged in the country which he had just con¬ 
quered. For a moment the luck seemed to turn. Hasdrubal, 
his brother, had defeated the Roman armies in Spain. He had 
crossed the Alps to come to Hannibal’s assistance. He sent 
messengers to the south to tell of his arrival and ask the other 
army to meet him in the plain of the Tiber. Unfortunately the 
messengers fell into the hands of the Romans and Hannibal 
waited in vain for further news. Then his brother’s head, neatly 
packed in a basket, came rolling into his camp and told him 
of the fate of the last of the Carthaginian troops. 

With Hasdrubal out of the way, young Publius Scipio 
easily reconquered Spain, and four years later the Romans 
were ready for a final attack upon Carthage. Hannibal was 

called back. He crossed the 
African Sea and tried to or¬ 
ganize the defences of his home 
city. In the year 202, at the 
battle of Zama, the Cartha¬ 
ginians were defeated. Han¬ 
nibal fled to Tyre. From there 
he went to Asia Minor to stir 
up the Syrians and the Mace¬ 
donians against Rome. He ac¬ 
complished very little, but his 
activities among these Asiatic 
powers gave the Romans an 
excuse to carry their warfare 
into the territory of the East and annex the greater part of 
the iEgean world. 

Driven from one city to another, a fugitive without a home, 
Hannibal at last knew that the end of his ambitious dream 



THE DEATH OF HANNIBAL 




















ROME AND CARTHAGE 


97 


had come. His beloved city of Carthage had been ruined by 
the war. She had been forced to sign a terrible peace. Her 
navy had been sunk. She had been forbidden to make war 
without Roman permission. She had been condemned to pay 
the Romans millions of dollars for endless years to come. 
Life offered no hope of a better future. In the year 190 b.c. 
Hannibal took poison and killed himself. 

Forty years later the Romans forced their last war upon 
Carthage. Three long years the inhabitants of the old Phoeni¬ 
cian colony held out against the power of the new republic. 
Hunger forced them to surrender. The few men and women 
who had survived the siege were sold as slaves. The city was 
set on fire. For two whole weeks the storehouses and the pal¬ 
aces and the great arsenal burned. Then a terrible curse was 
pronounced upon the blackened ruins and the Roman legions 
returned to Italy to enjoy their victory. 

For the next thousand years, the Mediterranean remained 
a European sea. But as soon as the Roman Empire had been 
destroyed, Asia made another attempt to dominate this great 
inland sea, as you will learn when I tell you about Mohammed. 


THE RISE OF ROME 


The Roman Empire was an accident. No one planned it. 
It “happened.” No famous general or statesman or cut¬ 
throat ever got up and said, “Friends, Romans, Citizens, we 
must found an empire. Follow me and together we shall con¬ 



quer all the sea and all the land from the Gates of Hercules to 
Mount Taurus.” 

• Rome produced famous generals and equally distinguished 
statesmen and cut-throats, and Roman armies fought all over 
the world. But the Roman empire-making was done without 
a preconceived plan. The average Roman was a very matter- 


98 















THE RISE OF ROME 


99 


of-fact citizen. He disliked theories about government. When 
someone began to recite “eastward the course of Roman Em¬ 
pire, etc., etc.,” he hastily left the forum. He just continued 
to take more and more land because circumstances forced him 
to do so. He was not driven by ambition or by greed. Both 
by nature and inclination he was a farmer and wanted to stay 
at home. But when he was attacked he was obliged to defend 
himself, and when the enemy happened to cross the sea to ask 
for aid in a distant country, then the patient Roman marched 
many dreary miles to defeat this dangerous foe. When this 
had been accomplished, he stayed behind to administer his 
newly conquered provinces lest they fall into the hands of 
wandering barbarians and become themselves a menace to 
Roman safety. It sounds rather complicated and yet to the 
contemporaries it was very simple, as you shall see in a mo¬ 
ment. 

In the year 203 b.c. Scipio had crossed the African Sea 
and had carried the war into Africa. Carthage had called Han¬ 
nibal back. Badly supported by his mercenaries, Hannibal 
had been defeated near Zama. The Romans had asked for his 
surrender, and Hannibal had fled to get aid from the kings of 
Macedonia and Syria, as I told you in my last chapter. 

The rulers of these two countries (remnants of the empire 
of Alexander the Great) just then were contemplating an ex¬ 
pedition against Egypt. They hoped to divide the rich Nile 
Valley between themselves. The king of Egypt had heard of 
this and had asked Rome to come to his support. The stage 
was set for a number of highly interesting plots and counter¬ 
plots. But the Romans, with their lack of imagination, rang 
the curtain down before the play had been fairly started. 
Their legions completely defeated the heavy Greek phalanx, 
which was still used by the Macedonians as their battle forma¬ 
tion. That happened in the year 197 b.c. at the battle in the 
plains of Cynoscephalre, or “Dogs’ Heads,” in central Thes- 

salv. 

* 

The Romans then marched southward to Attica and in¬ 
formed the Greeks that they had come to “deliver the Hellenes 


> > ) 
> *> 

1 > 5 


100 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


from the Macedonian yoke.” The Greeks, having learned 
nothing in their years of semi-slavery, used their new freedom 
in a most unfortunate way. All the little city-states once more 
began to quarrel with each other as they had done in the good 
old days. The Romans, who had little understanding and less 
love for these silly bickerings of a race which they rather de¬ 
spised, showed great forbearance. But tiring of these endless 
dissensions they lost patience, invaded Greece, burned down 
Corinth (to “encourage the other Greeks”), and sent a Roman 
governor to Athens to rule this turbulent province. In this 
way Macedonia and Greece became buffer states which pro¬ 
tected Rome’s eastern frontier. 

Meanwhile right across the Hellespont lay the kingdom of 
Syria, and Antiochus III, who ruled that vast land, had shown 
great eagerness when his distinguished guest, General Han¬ 
nibal, explained to him how easy it would he to invade Italy 
and sack the city of Rome. 

Lucius Scipio, a brother of Scipio the African fighter who 
had defeated Hannibal and his Carthaginians at Zama, was 
sent to Asia Minor. He destroyed the armies of the Syrian 
king near Magnesia in the year 190 b.c. Shortly afterwards 
Antiochus was lynched by his own people. Asia Minor be¬ 
came a Roman protectorate, and the small city-republic of 
Rome was mistress of most of the lands which bordered upon 
the Mediterranean. 


i f 
c * < 

<* t 


C (. «’ 


THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


When the Roman armies returned from these many vic¬ 
torious campaigns, they were received with great jubilation. 
Alas and alack! this sudden glory did not make the country 
any happier. On the contrary, the endless campaigns had ruined 
the farmers who had been obliged to do the hard work of em¬ 
pire-making. They had placed too much power in the hands 
of the successful generals (and their private friends), who had 
used the wars as an excuse for wholesale robbery. 

The old Roman Republic had been proud of the simplicity 
which had characterized the lives of her famous men. The 
new republic felt ashamed of the shabby coats and the high 
principles which had been fashionable in the days of its grand¬ 
fathers. It became a land of rich people ruled by rich people 
for the benefit of rich people. As such it was doomed to dis¬ 
astrous failure, as I shall now tell you. 

Within less than a century and a half, Rome had become 
the mistress of practically all the land around the Mediter¬ 
ranean. In those early days of history a prisoner of war lost 
his freedom and became a slave. The Roman regarded war as 
a very serious business and showed no mercy to a conquered 
foe. After the fall of Carthage, the Carthaginian women and 
children were sold into bondage together with their own slaves. 
And a like fate awaited the obstinate inhabitants of Greece and 
Macedonia and Spain and Syria when they dared to revolt 
against the Roman power. 

Two thousand years ago a slave was merely a piece of 


101 







102 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


machinery. Nowadays a rich man invests his money in fac¬ 
tories. The rich people of Rome (senators, generals, and war- 
profiteers) invested theirs in land and in slaves. The land 
they bought or took in the newly-acquired provinces. The 
slaves they bought in open market wherever they happened to 
be cheapest. During most of the third and second centuries 
before Christ there was a plentiful supply, and as a result the 
landowners worked their slaves until they dropped dead in their 
tracks, when they bought new ones at the nearest bargain- 
counters of Corinthian or Carthaginian captives. 

And now behold the fate of the free-born farmer! 

He had done his duty toward Rome and had fought her 
battles without complaint. When he came home after ten, 
fifteen, or twenty years, his lands were covered with weeds and 
his family had been ruined. But he was a strong man and 
willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and waited 
for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together 
with his cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners 
who worked their estates with slaves could underbid him all 
along the line. For a couple of years he tried to hold his own. 

Then he gave up in despair. He left the country and went 
to the nearest city. In the city he was as hungry as he had been 
before on the land. But he shared his misery with thousands 
of other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy 
hovels in the suburbs of the large cities. They were apt to 
get sick and die from terrible epidemics. They were all pro¬ 
foundly discontented. They had fought for their country and 
this was their reward. They were always willing to listen to 
those plausible spell-binders who gather around a public griev¬ 
ance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a 
grave menace to the safety of the state. 

But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders. 
“We have our army and our policemen,” they argued, “they 
will keep the mob in order.” And they hid themselves behind 
the high walls of their pleasant villas and cultivated their gar¬ 
dens and read the poems of a certain Homer which a Greek 
slave had just translated into very pleasing Latin verses. 



THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


103 


In a few families, however, the old tradition of unselfish 
service to the commonwealth continued. Cornelia, the daugh¬ 
ter of Scipio Africanus, had been married to a Roman by the 
name of Gracchus. She had two sons, Tiberius and Gaius. 
When the boys grew up they entered politics and tried to bring 
about certain much-needed reforms. A census had shown 
that most of the land of the Italian peninsula was owned by 
two thousand noble families. Tiberius Gracchus, having been 
elected a tribune, tried to help the freemen. He revived two 
ancient laws that restricted the number of acres which a sin¬ 
gle owner might possess. In this way he hoped to revive the 
valuable old class of small and independent freeholders. The 
newly-rich called him a robber and an enemy of the state. 
There were street riots. A party of thugs was hired to kill the 
popular Tribune. Tiberius Gracchus was attacked when he 
entered the assembly and was beaten to death. 

Ten years later his brother Gaius tried the experiment of 
reforming a nation against the expressed wishes of a strong 
privileged class. He passed a “poor law” which was meant 
to help the destitute farmers. Eventually it made the greater 
part of the Roman citizens into professional beggars. He es¬ 
tablished colonies of destitute people in distant parts of the 
Empire, but these settlements failed to attract the right sort of 
people. Before Gaius Gracchus could do more harm he too 
was murdered and his followers were either killed or exiled. 

The first two reformers had been gentlemen. The two 
who came after were of a very different stamp. They were 
professional soldiers. One was called Marius. The name of 
the other was Sulla. Both enjoyed a large personal following. 

Sulla was the leader of the landowners. Marius, the vic¬ 
tor in a great battle at the foot of the Alps when the Teu¬ 
tons and the Cimbri had been annihilated, was the popular 
hero of the disinherited freemen. 

Now it happened in the year 88 b.c. that the senate of 
Rome was greatly disturbed by rumors that came from Asia. 
Mithridates, king of a country along the shores of the Black 
Sea, and a Greek on his mother’s side, had seen the possibility 


104 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of establishing a second Alexandrian empire. He began his 
campaign for world domination with the murder of all Roman 
citizens who happened to he in Asia Minor, men, women, and 
children. Such an act, of course, meant war. The senate 
equipped an army to march against the king of Pontus and 
punish him for his crime. Rut who was to he commander-in¬ 
chief? “Sulla,” said the senate, “because he is consul.” 
“Marius,” said the mob, “because he has been consul five times 
and because he is the champion of our rights.” 

Possession is nine points of the law. Sulla happened to be 
in actual command of the army. He went east to defeat 
Mithridates and Marius fled to Africa. There he waited until 
he heard that Sulla had crossed into Asia. He then returned 
to Italy, gathered a motley crew of malcontents, marched on 
Rome, and entered the city with his professional highwaymen. 
Marius spent five days and five nights slaughtering his enemies 
in the senatorial party, got himself elected consul, and prompt¬ 
ly died from the excitement of the last fortnight. 

There followed four years of disorder. Then Sulla, having 
defeated Mithridates, announced that he was ready to return 
to Rome and settle a few old scores of his own. He was as 
good as his word. For weeks his soldiers were busy executing 
those of their fellow citizens who were suspected of democratic 
sympathies. One day they got hold of a young fellow who 
had been often seen in the company of Marius. They were 
going to hang him when someone interfered. “The boy is too 
young,” he said, and they let him go. His name was Julius 
Caesar. You shall meet him again on the next page. 

As for Sulla, he became “dictator,” which meant sole and 
supreme ruler of all the Roman possessions. He ruled Rome 
for four years, and he died quietly in his bed, having spent the 
last year of his life tenderly raising his cabbages, as was the 
custom of so many Romans who had spent a lifetime killing 
their fellow men. 

But conditions did not grow better. On the contrary, they 
grew worse. Another general, Gnams Pompeius, or Pompey, 
a close friend of Sulla, went east to renew the war against the 




THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


105 


ever troublesome Mithridates. He drove that energetic poten¬ 
tate into the mountains, where Mithridates took poison and 
killed himself, well knowing what fate awaited him as a Roman 
captive. Xext he reestablished the authority of Rome over 
Syria, destroyed Jerusalem, roamed through western Asia 
trying to revive the myth of Alexander the Great, and at last 
(in the year 62 ) returned to Rome with a dozen shiploads of 
defeated kings and princes and generals, all of whom were 
forced to march in the triumphal procession of this enormously 
popular Roman who presented his city with the sum of forty 
million dollars in plunder. 

It was necessary that the government of Rome be placed 
in the hands of a strong man. Only a few months before, the 
town had almost fallen into the hands of a good-for-nothing 
young aristocrat by the name of Catiline, who had gambled 
away his money and hoped to reimburse himself for his losses 
by a little plundering. Cicero, a public-spirited lawyer, had 
discovered the plot, had warned the senate, and had forced 
Catiline to flee. But there were other young men with similar 
ambitions and it was no time for idle talk. 

Pompey organized a triumvirate which was to take charge 
of affairs. He became the leader of this Vigilante Commit¬ 
tee. Gaius Julius Caesar, who had made a reputation for him¬ 
self as governor of Spain, was the second in command. The 
third was an indifferent sort of person by the name of Crassus. 
He had been elected because he was incredibly rich, having been 
a successful contractor of war supplies. He soon went upon 
an expedition against the Parthians and was killed. 

But Caesar, who was bv far the ablest of the three, decided 
that he needed a little more military glory to become a popular 
hero. He crossed the Alps and conquered Gaul, which is now 
called France. Then he hammered a solid wooden bridge 
across the Rhine and invaded the land of the wild Teutons. 
Finally he took ship and visited England. Heaven knows 
where he might have ended if he had not been forced to return 
to Italy. Pompey, so he was informed, had been appointed 
dictator for life. This of course meant that Caesar was to be 


106 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


placed on the list of the “retired officers,” and the idea did not 
appeal to him. He remembered that he had begun life as a 
follower of Marius. He decided to teach the senators and 
their “dictator” another lesson. He crossed the Rubicon River, 
which separated the province of Cisalpine Gaul from Italy. 



CLESAR GOES WESTWARD 


Everywhere he was received as the “friend of the people.” 
Without difficulty Csesar entered Rome, and Pompey fled to 
Greece. Cresar followed him and defeated his army near 
Pharsalus. Pompey sailed across the Mediterranean and es¬ 
caped to Egypt. When he landed he was murdered by order 
of young King Ptolemy. A few days later Csesar arrived. 
He found himself caught in a trap. Both the Egyptians and 
the Roman garrison, which had remained faithful to Pompey, 
attacked his camp. 

Fortune was with Csesar. He succeeded in setting fire to 
the Egyptian fleet. Incidentally the sparks of the burning 
vessels fell on the roof of the famous library of Alexandria 
(which was just off the water front) and destroyed it. Next 













THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


107 


he attacked the Egyptian army, drove the soldiers into the 
Nile, drowned Ptolemy, and established a new government 
under Cleopatra, the sister of the late king. Just then word 
reached him that Pharnaces, the son and heir of Mithridates, 
had gone on the warpath. Caesar marched northward, de¬ 
feated Pharnaces in a war which lasted five days, sent word of 
his victory to Rome in the famous sentence, “Veni, vidi, vici,” 
which is Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” and returned 
to Egypt. There he fell desperately in love with Cleopatra, 
who followed him to Rome when he returned to take charge of 
the government in the year 46. He led not less than four dif¬ 
ferent victory parades, having won four different campaigns. 

Then Caesar appeared in the senate to report upon his ad¬ 
ventures, and the grateful senate made him “dictator” for 
ten years. It was a fatal step. « 

The new dictator made serious attempts to reform the 
Roman state. He made it possible for freemen to become 
members of the senate. He conferred the rights of citizenship 
upon distant communities as had been done in the early days 
of Roman history. He permitted “foreigners” to exercise in¬ 
fluence upon the government. He reformed the administra¬ 
tion of the distant provinces, which certain aristocratic families 
had come to regard as their private possessions. In short he 
did many things for the good of the majority of the people, but 
they made him thoroughly unpopular with the most powerful 
men in the state. 

Half a hundred young aristocrats formed a plot “to save 
the republic.” On the Ides of March (the fifteenth of March 
according to that new calendar which Caesar had brought with 
him from Egypt) Caesar was murdered when he entered the 
senate. Once more Rome was without a master. 

There were two men who tried to continue the tradition of 
Caesar’s glory. One was Antony, his former secretary. The 
other was Octavian, Caesar’s grand-nephew and heir to his es¬ 
tate. Octavian remained in Rome, but Antony went to Egypt 
to be near Cleopatra, with whom he too had fallen in love, as 
seems to have been the habit of Roman generals. 



THE GREAT ROMAN EMPIRE 



























THE ROMAN EMPIRE 


109 


A war broke out between the two. In the battle of Ac- 
tium, Octavian defeated Antony. Antony killed himself, and 
Cleopatra was left alone to face the enemy. She tried very 
hard to make Octavian her third Roman conquest. When she 
saw that she could make no impression upon this very proud 
aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman prov¬ 
ince. 

As lor Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did 
not repeat the mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how 
people will shy at words. He was very modest in his demands 
when he returned to Rome. He did not want to be a “dicta¬ 
tor.” He would be entirely satisfied with the title of “The Hon¬ 
orable.” But when the senate, a few years later, addressed 
him as Augustus—the Illustrious—he did not object; and a few 
years later the man in the street called him Caesar, while the 
soldiers, accustomed to regard Octavian as their commander- 
in-chief, referred to him as the Princeps or Chief, the Imper- 
ator or Emperor. The republic had become an empire, but 
the average Roman was hardly aware of the fact. 

In 14 a.d. his position as the absolute ruler of the Roman 
people had become so well established that he was made an 
object of that divine worship which hitherto had been reserved 
for the gods. And his successors were true “emperors”—the 
absolute rulers of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. 

If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired 
of anarchy and disorder. He did not care who ruled him, pro¬ 
vided the new master gave him a chance to live quietly and 
without the noise of eternal street riots. Augustus gave his 
subjects forty years of peace. He had no desire to extend the 
frontiers of his domains. In the year 9 a.d. he had contem¬ 
plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was 
inhabited by the Teutons. But Varus, his general, had been 
killed with all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that 
the Romans made no further attempts to civilize these wild 
people. 

They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem 
of internal reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two 





110 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


centuries of revolution and foreign war had repeatedly killed 
the best men among the younger generations. They had ruined 
the class of the free farmers. They had introduced slave labor, 
against which no freeman could hope to compete. They had 
turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized and 
unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. They had created a large 
bureaucracy—petty officials who were underpaid and who were 
forced to take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for 
their families. Worst of all, they had accustomed people to vio¬ 
lence, to bloodshed, to a barbarous pleasure in the pain and 
suffering of others. 

Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our 
era was a magnificent political structure, so large that Alex¬ 
ander’s empire was only a group of its minor provinces. Under¬ 
neath this glory there lived millions upon millions of poor and 
tired human beings, toiling like ants who have built a nest 
underneath a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of some 
one else. They shared their food with the animals of the fields. 
They lived in stables. They died without hope. 

It was the seven hundred and fifty-third year since the 
founding of Rome. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus 
was living in the palace of the Palatine Hill, busily engaged 
upon the task of ruling his empire. 

In a little village of distant Syria, Mary, the wife of Joseph 
the carpenter, was tending her little boy, born in a stable of 
Bethlehem. 

This is a strange world. 

Before long the palace and the stable were to meet in open 
combat. 

And the stable was to emerge victorious. 





JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 


In the autumn of the year of the city 815 (which would be 
62 a.d., in our way of counting time) Aesculapius Cultellus, a 
Roman physician, wrote to his nephew, who was with the army 
in Syria, as follows: 

My dear Nephew, 

A few days ago I was called in to prescribe for a sick man 
named Paul. He appeared to be a Roman citizen of Jewish 
parentage, well educated and of agreeable manners. I had 
been told that he was here in connection with a lawsuit, an ap¬ 
peal from one of our provincial courts, Caesarea or some such 
place in the eastern Mediterranean. He had been described to 
me as a “wild and violent” fellow who had been making 
speeches against the people and against the law. I found him 
very intelligent and of great honesty. 

A friend of mine who used to be with the army in Asia 
Minor tells me that he heard something about him in Ephesus, 
where he was preaching sermons about a strange new god. I 
asked my patient if this were true, and whether he had told the 
people to rebel against the will of our beloved emperor. Paul 
answered me that the kingdom of which he had spoken was 
not of this world. He added many strange utterances which 
I did not understand, but which were probably due to his fever. 

His personality made a great impression upon me, and I 
was sorry to hear that he was killed on the Ostian Road a few 
days ago. Therefore I am writing this letter to you. When 


in 







112 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


next you visit Jerusalem, I want you to find out something 
about my friend Paul and the strange Jewish prophet who 
seems to have been his teacher. Our slaves are getting much 
excited about this so-called Messiah, and a few of them, who 
openly talked of the new kingdom (whatever that means), have 
been crucified. I would like to know the truth about all these 
rumors, and I am 

Your devoted uncle, 

AESCULAPIUS CuLTELLTJS. 

Six weeks later, Gladius Ensa, the nephew, a captain of the 
VII Gallic Infantry, answered as follows: 

My dear Uncle, 

I received your letter and I have obeyed your instructions. 

Two weeks ago our brigade was sent to Jerusalem. There 
have been several revolutions during the last century and there 
is not much left of the old city. We have been here now for a 
month, and to-morrow we shall continue our march to Petra, 
where there has been trouble with some of the Arab tribes. I 
shall use this evening to answer your questions, but pray do 
not expect a detailed report. 

I have talked with most of the older men in this city, but 
few have been able to give me any definite information. A 
few days ago a pedlar came to the camp. I bought some of 
his olives and I asked him whether he had ever heard of the 
famous Messiah who was killed when he was young. He said 
that he remembered it very clearly, because his father had 
taken him to Golgotha (a hill just outside the city) to see 
the execution and to show him what became of the enemies of 
the laws of the people of Judasa. He gave me the address of 
one Joseph, who had been a personal friend of the Messiah; 
and told me that I had better go to see him if I wanted to 
know more. 

This morning I went to call on Joseph. He was quite an 
old man. He had been a fisherman on one of the fresh-water 


JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 


113 


lakes. His memory was clear, and from him at last I got a 
fairly definite account of what had happened during the trou¬ 
blesome days before I was born. 

Tiberius, our great and glorious emperor, was on the 
throne, and an officer of the name of Pontius Pilatus was gov- 



THE HOLY LAND 


ernor of Judaea and Samaria. Joseph knew little about this 
Pilatus. He seemed to have been an honest enough official 
who left a decent reputation as procurator of the province. In 
the year 783 or 784 (Joseph had forgotten when) Pilatus was 
called to Jerusalem on account of a riot. A certain young 
man (the son of a carpenter of Nazareth) was said to be plan¬ 
ning a revolution against the Roman government. Strangely 
enough our own intelligence officers, who are usually well in¬ 
formed, appear to have heard nothing about it, and when 
they investigated the matter they reported that the carpenter 





















114 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


was an excellent citizen and that there was no reason to pro¬ 
ceed against him. But the old-fashioned leaders of the Jewish 
faith, according to Joseph, were much upset. They greatly 
disliked his popularity with the masses of the poorer Hebrews. 
The “Nazarene” (so they told Pilatus) had publicly claimed 
that a Greek or a Roman or even a Philistine, who tried to live 
a decent and honorable life, was quite as good as a Jew who 
spent his days studying the ancient laws of Moses. Pilatus 
does not seem to have been impressed by this argument, but 
when the crowds around the temple threatened to lynch Jesus 
and kill all his followers, he decided to take the carpenter into 
custody to save his life. 

He does not appear to have understood the real nature of 
the quarrel. Whenever he asked the Jewish priests to explain 
their grievances, they shouted “heresy” and “treason” and got 
terribly excited. Finally, so Joseph told me, Pilatus sent for 
Joshua (that was the name of the Nazarene, but the Greeks 
who live in this part of the world always refer to him as Jesus) 
to examine him personally. He talked to him for several 
hours. He asked him about the “dangerous doctrines” which 
he was said to have preached on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. 
But Jesus answered that he never referred to politics. He was 
not so much interested in the bodies of men as in man’s soul. 
He wanted all people to regard their neighbors as their 
brothers and to love one single God, who was the Father of all 
living beings. 

Pilatus, who seems to have been well versed in the doctrines 
of the Stoics and the other Greek philosophers, does not ap¬ 
pear to have discovered anything seditious in the talk of Jesus. 
According to my informant he made another attempt to save 
the life of the kindly prophet. He kept putting the execution 
off. Meanwhile the Jewish people, lashed into fury by their 
priests, got frantic with rage. There had been many riots in 
Jerusalem before this, and there were only a few Roman sol¬ 
diers within calling distance. Reports were being sent to the 
Roman authorities in Caesarea that Pilatus had “fallen a vic¬ 
tim to the teachings of the Nazarene.” Petitions were being 


JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 


115 


circulated all through the city to have Pilatus recalled, because 
he was an enemy of the emperor. You know that our gov¬ 
ernors have strict instructions to avoid an open break with 
their foreign subjects. To save the country from civil war, 
Pilatus finally sacrificed his prisoner, Joshua, who behaved 
with great dignity and who forgave all those who hated him. 
He was crucified amidst the howls and the laughter of the 
Jerusalem mob. 

That is what Joseph told me, with tears running down his 
old cheeks. I gave him a gold piece when I left him, but he 
refused it and asked me to hand it to one poorer than himself. 
I also asked him a few questions about your friend Paul. He 
had known him slightly. He seems to have been a tent-maker, 
who gave up his profession that he might preach the words of 
a loving and forgiving God, who was so very different from 
that Jehovah of whom the Jewish priests are telling us all 
the time. Afterwards, Paul appears to have traveled much 
in Asia Minor and in Greece, telling the slaves that they were 
all children of one loving Father and that happiness awaits all, 
both rich and poor, who have tried to live honest lives and have 
done good to those who were suffering and miserable. 

I hope that I have answered your questions to your satis¬ 
faction. The whole story seems very harmless to me as far as 
the safety of the state is concerned. But then, we Romans 
never have been able to understand the people of this province. 
I am sorry that they have killed your friend Paul. I wish that 
I were at home again, and I am, as ever, 

Your dutiful nephew, 


Gladius Ensa. 


THE FALL OF ROME 


The textbooks of ancient history give the date 476 as the 
year in which Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor 
was driven off his throne. But Rome, which was not built in 
a day, took a long time falling. The process was so slow and 
so gradual that most Romans did not realize how their old 
world was coming to an end. They complained about the un¬ 
rest of the times—they grumbled about the high prices of food 
and about the low wages of the workmen—they cursed the 
profiteers who had a monopoly of the grain and the wool and 
the gold coin. Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually 
rapacious governor. But the majority of the people during the 
first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever their 
purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according to 
their nature) and went to the theater (whenever there was a 
free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the 
big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had 
outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish. 

How could they realize the threatened danger? Rome 
made a fine showing of outward glory. Well-paved roads con¬ 
nected the different provinces. The imperial police were active 
and showed little tenderness for highwaymen. The frontier 
was closely guarded against the savage tribes who seemed to 
be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The whole 
world was paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a 
score of able men were working day and night to undo the 
mistakes of the past and bring about a return to the happier 
conditions of the early republic. 


116 









THE FALL OF ROME 


117 


But the underlying causes of the decay of the state had not 
been removed and reform therefore was impossible. 

Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as 
Athens and Corinth had been city-states in ancient Greece. It 
had been able to dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome 
as the ruler of the entire civilized world was a political impos¬ 
sibility and could not endure. Her young men were killed in 
her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by long military 
service and by taxation. They either became professional beg¬ 
gars or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave them 
board and lodging in exchange for their services and made 
them “serfs”—who are neither slaves nor freemen, but who 
have become part of the soil upon which they work. 

The empire, the state, had become everything. The com¬ 
mon citizen had dwindled down to nothing. As for the slaves, 
they had heard the words that were spoken by Paul. They had 
accepted the message of the humble carpenter of Nazareth. 
They did not rebel against their masters. On the contrary, 
they had been taught to be meek and they obeyed their supe¬ 
riors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs of this world 
which had proved such a miserable place of abode. They were 
willing to fight the good fight that they might enter into the 
Kingdom of Heaven. But they were not willing to engage 
in warfare for the benefit of an ambitious emperor who aspired 
to glory by way of a foreign campaign in the land of the Par¬ 
tisans or the Numidians or the Scots. 

And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by. 
The first emperors had continued the tradition of “leadership” 
which had given the old tribal chieftains such a hold upon their 
subjects. But the emperors of the second and third centuries 
were barrack emperors, professional soldiers, who existed by 
the grace of their bodyguards, the so-called Praetorians. They 
succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity, murdering their 
way into the palace and being murdered out of it as soon as 
their successors had become rich enough to bribe the guards 
into a new rebellion. 

Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of 



118 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the northern frontier. As there were no longer any native 
Roman armies to stop their progress, foreign mercenaries had 
to be hired to fight the invader. As the foreign soldier might 
be of the same blood as his supposed enemy, he was apt to be 
quite lenient when he engaged in battle. Finally, by way of 



WHEN THE BARBARIANS GOT THROUGH WITH A ROMAN CITY 

experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle within the con¬ 
fines of the Empire. Others followed. Soon these tribes com¬ 
plained bitterly of the greedy Roman taxgatherers, who took 
away their last penny. When they got no redress, they 
marched to Rome and loudly demanded that they be heard. 

This made Rome very uncomfortable as an imperial resi¬ 
dence. Constantine (who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for 
a new capital. lie chose Byzantium, the gateway for the 
commerce between Europe and Asia. The city was renamed 
Constantinople, and the court moved eastward. When Con¬ 
stantine died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient 
administration, divided the Empire between them. The elder 
lived in Rome and ruled in the West. The younger stayed in 
Constantinople and was master of the East. 












ROME 



















120 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation 
of the Huns, those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more 
than two centuries maintained themselves in northern Europe 
and continued their career of bloodshed until they were de- 
feated near Chalons in France in the year 451. As soon as the 
Huns had reached the Danube, they had begun to press hard 
upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save themselves, 
were thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The Emperor 
Valens tried to stop them, but was killed near Adrianople 
in the year 378. Twenty-two years later, under their king, 
Alaric, these same West Goths marched westward and attacked 
Rome. They did not plunder, and they destroyed only a few pal¬ 
aces. Next came the Vandals, who showed less respect for 
the venerable traditions of the city. Then the Burgundians. 
Then the East Goths. Then the Alemanni. Then the Franks. 
There was no end to the invasions. Rome at last was at the 
mercy of every ambitious highway robber who could gather a 
few followers. 

In the year 402 the western emperor fled to Ravenna, 
which was a seaport and strongly fortified, and there, in the 
year 475, Odoacer, commander of a regiment of the German 
mercenaries who wanted the farms of Italy to be divided 
among themselves, gently but effectively pushed from his 
throne Romulus Augustulus, the last of the emperors who 
ruled the western division, and proclaimed himself Patrician 
or ruler of Rome. The eastern emperor, who was very busy 
with his own affairs, recognized him, and for ten years Odo¬ 
acer ruled what was left of the western provinces. 

A few years later, Theodoric, king of the East Goths, 
invaded the newly formed Patriciate, took Ravenna, murdered 
Odoacer at his own dinner table, and established a Gothic 
kingdom amidst the ruins of the western part of the Empire. 
This Patriciate did not last long. In the sixth century a 
motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and Avars 
invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established 
a new state of which Pavia became the capital. 

Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter 



THE FALL OF ROME 


121 


neglect and despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered 
time and again. The schools had been burned down. The 
teachers had been starved to death. The rich people had been 
thrown out of their villas, which were now inhabited by evil¬ 
smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen into 
decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come 
to a standstill. Civilization, the product of thousands of years 
of patient labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and 
Greeks and Romans, which had lifted man high above the 
most daring dreams of his earliest ancestors, threatened to 
perish from the western continent. 

It is true that in the Far East Constantinople continued to 
be the center of an empire for another thousand years. But 
it hardly counted as a part of the European continent. Its 
interests lay in the East. It began to forget its Western origin. 
Gradually the Roman language was given up for the Greek. 
The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was writ¬ 
ten in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The 
emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the godlike 
kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the 
Nile, three thousand years before. When missionaries of the 
Byzantine Church looked for fresh fields of activity, they went 
eastward and carried the civilization of Byzantium into the 
vast wilderness of Russia. 

As for the West, it was left to the mercies of the barbarians. 
For twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were 
the order of the day. One thing—and one thing alone—saved 
Europe from complete destruction, from a return to the days 
of cave men and the hyena. 

This was the Church—the flock of humble men and women 
who for many centuries had confessed themselves the fol¬ 
lowers of Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, who had been 
killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be saved the 
trouble of a street riot in a little city somewhere along the 
Syrian frontier. 





THE RISE OF THE CHURCH 


The average intelligent Roman who lived under the em¬ 
pire had taken very little interest in the gods of his fathers. 
A few times a year he went to the temple, but merely as a 
matter of custom. He looked on patiently when the people 
celebrated a religious festival with a solemn procession. But he 
regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and Neptune as 
something rather childish, a survival from the crude days of 
the early republic and not a fit subject of study for a man 
who had mastered the works of the Stoics and the Epicureans 
and the other great philosophers of Athens. 

This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The 
government insisted that all peojde, Romans, foreigners, 
Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, should pay a certain outward re¬ 
spect to the image of the Emperor which was supposed to stand 
in every temple, just as a picture of the President of the 
United States is apt to hang in an American post office. But 
this was a formality without any deeper meaning. Generally 
speaking, everybody could honor, revere, and adore whatever 
gods he pleased, and as a result Rome was filled with all 
sorts of queer little temples and synagogues, dedicated to the 
worship of Egyptian and African and Asiatic divinities. 

When the first disciples of Jesus reached Rome and began 
to preach their new doctrines of a universal brotherhood of man, 
nobody objected. The man in the street stopped and listened. 
Rome, the capital of the world, had always been full of wander¬ 
ing preachers, each proclaiming his own “mystery.” Most of 








.THE RISE OF THE CHURCH 


123 


the self-appointed priests appealed to the senses—promised 
golden rewards and endless pleasure to the followers of their 
own particular god. Soon the crowd in the street noticed 
that the so-called Christians (the followers of the Christ or 
“anointed”) spoke a very different language. They did not 
appear to he impressed by great riches or a noble position. 
They extolled the beauties of poverty and humility and meek¬ 
ness. These were not exactly the virtues which had made 
Rome the mistress of the world. It was rather interesting to 
listen to a “mystery” which told people in the heyday of their 
glory that their worldly success could not possibly bring them 
lasting happiness. 

Besides, the preachers of the Christian mystery told dread¬ 
ful stories of the fate that awaited those who refused to listen to 
the words of the true God. It was never wise to take chances. 
Of course the old Roman gods still existed, but were they 
strong enough to protect their friends against the powers of 
this new deity who had been brought to Europe from distant 
Asia? People began to have doubts. They returned to listen 
to further explanations of the new creed. After a while they 
began to meet the men and women who preached the words of 
Jesus. They found them very different from the average 
Roman priests. They were all dreadfully poor. They were 
kind to slaves and to animals. They did not try to gain riches, 
but gave away whatever they had. The example of their un¬ 
selfish lives persuaded many Romans to forsake the old re¬ 
ligion. They joined the small communities of Christians who 
met in the hack rooms of private houses or somewhere in an 
open field, and the temples were deserted. 

This went on year after year, and the number of Christians 
continued to increase. Presbyters or priests (the original 
Greek meant “elder”) were elected to guard the interests of 
the small churches. A bishop was made the head of all the 
communities within a single province. Peter, who had fol¬ 
lowed Paul to Rome, was the first Bishop of Rome. In due 
time his successors (who were addressed as Father or Papa) 
came to be known as popes. 


124 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


The Church became a powerful institution within the em¬ 
pire. The Christian doctrines appealed to those who despaired 
of this world. They also attracted many strong men who 
found it impossible to make a career under the imperial gov¬ 
ernment, but who could exercise their gifts of leadership among 



A CLOISTER 


the humble followers of the Nazarene teacher. At last the 
state was obliged to take notice. The Roman Empire (I have 
said this before) was tolerant through indifference. It allowed 
everybody to seek salvation after his or her own fashion. But 
it insisted that the different sects keep the peace among them¬ 
selves and obey the wise rule of ‘dive and let live.” 

The Christian communities, however, refused to practice 
any sort of tolerance. They publicly declared that their God, 
and their God alone, was the true ruler of Heaven and Earth, 
and that all other gods were impostors. This seemed unfair 




















THE RISE OF THE CHURCH 


125 


to the other sects and the police discouraged such utterances. 
The Christians persisted. 

Soon there were further difficulties. The Christians refused 
to go through the formality of paying homage to the em¬ 
peror. They refused to appear when they were called upon 
to join the army. The Roman magistrates threatened to 
punish them. The Christians answered that this miserable 
world was only the anteroom to a very pleasant Heaven and 
that they were more than willing to suffer death for their 
principles. The Romans, puzzled by such conduct, sometimes 
killed the offenders, but more often they did not. There was 
a certain amount of lynching during the earliest years of the 
Church, but this was the work of that part of the mob which 
accused their meek Christian neighbors of every conceivable 
crime (such as slaughtering and eating babies, bringing about 
sickness and pestilence, betraying the country in times of dan¬ 
ger), because it was a harmless sport and devoid of danger, as 
the Christians refused to fight back. 

Meanwhile, Rome continued to be invaded by the barbar¬ 
ians, and when her armies failed Christian missionaries went 
forth to preach their gospel of peace to the wild Teutons. 
They were strong men without fear of death. They spoke a 
language which left no doubt as to the future of unrepentant 
sinners. The Teutons were deeply impressed. They still 
had a deep respect for the wisdom of the ancient city of Rome. 
Those men were Romans. They probably spoke the truth. 
Soon the Christian missionaries became a power in the savage 
regions of the Saxons and the Franks. Half a dozen mis¬ 
sionaries were as valuable as a whole regiment of soldiers. 
The emperors began to understand that the Christians might 
be of great use to them. In some of the provinces they were 
given equal rights with those who remained faithful to the old 
gods. The great change, however, came during the last half 
of the fourth century. 

Constantine, sometimes (Heaven knows why) called Con¬ 
stantine the Great, was emperor. He was a terrible ruffian, 
but people of tender qualities could hardly hope to survive 


126 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


in that hard-fighting age. During a long and checkered career, 
Constantine had experienced many ups and downs. Once, 
when almost defeated by his enemies, he thought that he would 
try the power of this new Asiatic deity of whom everybody was 
talking. He promised that he too would become a Christian 
if he were successful in the coming battle. He won the victory, 
and thereafter he was convinced of the power of the Christian 
God and allowed himself to be baptized. 

From that moment on, the Christian Church was officially 
recognized. This greatly strengthened the position of the new 
faith. 

But the Christians still formed a very small minority of 
all the people (not more than five or six per cent), and in order 
to win they were forced to refuse all compromise. The old 
gods must he destroyed. For a short spell the Emperor Julian, 
a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the pagan gods 
from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds dur¬ 
ing a campaign in Persia, and his successor Jovian reestablished 
the Church in all its glory. One after the other the doors of the 
ancient temples were then closed. Then came the Emperor 
Justinian (who built the church of Saint Sophia in Constan- 



THE GOTHS ARE COMING 







THE RISE OF THE CHURCH 


127 


tinople), who discontinued the school of philosophy which had 
been founded at Athens by Plato. 

That was the end of the old Greek world in which man 
had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own 
dreams according to his desires. The somewhat vague rules 
of conduct of the philosophers had proved a poor compass 
by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge of savagery 
and ignorance had swept away the established order of things. 
There was need of something more positive and more definite. 
This the Church provided. 

During an age when nothing was certain, the Church stood 
like a rock and never receded from those principles which it 
held to be true and sacredt This steadfast courage gained the 
admiration of the multitudes and carried the Church of Rome 
safely through the difficulties which destroyed the Roman state. 

There was, however, a certain element of luck in the final 
success of the Christian faith. After the disappearance of 
Theodoric’s Roman-Gothic kingdom, in the fifth century, 
Italy was comparatively free from foreign invasion. The 
Lombards and Saxons and Slavs, who succeeded the Goths, 
were weak and backward tribes. In those circumstances it was 
possible for the bishops of Rome to maintain the independence 
of their city. Soon the remnants of the Empire, scattered 
throughout the peninsula, recognized the dukes of Rome (or 
bishops) as their political and spiritual rulers. 

It was time for the appearance of a strong man. He 
came in the year 590, and his name was Gregory. He be¬ 
longed to the ruling classes of ancient Rome, and he had 
been “prefect” or mayor of the city. Then he had become 
a monk and a bishop and finally, and much against his will 
(for he wanted to he a missionary and preach Christianity to 
the heathen of England), he had been dragged to the church 
of Saint Peter to be made pope. He ruled only fourteen 
years, but when he died the Christian world of western Europe 
had officially recognized the bishop of Rome, the pope, as 
the head of the entire Church. 

This power, however, did not extend to the East. In Con- 


128 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


stantinople the emperors continued the old custom which had 
recognized the successors of Augustus and Tiberius both as 
head of the government and as high priest of the established 
religion. In the year 1453 the eastern Roman Empire was 
conquered by the Turks. Constantinople was taken, and Con¬ 
stantine Paleologus, the last Roman emperor, was killed on 
the steps of the church of the Holy Sophia. 

A few years before, Zoe, the daughter of his brother 
Thomas, had married Ivan III of Russia. In this way did the 
grand-dukes of Moscow fall heir to the traditions of Constan¬ 
tinople. The double eagle of old Byzantium (reminiscent of 
the days when Rome had been divided into an eastern and a 
western part) became the coat of arms of modern Russia. 
The tsar, who had been merely the first of the Russian nobles, 
assumed the aloofness and the dignity of a Roman emperor 
before whom all subjects, both high and low, were incon¬ 
siderable slaves. The court was refashioned after the oriental 
pattern which the eastern emperors had imported from Asia 
and from Egypt and which (so they flattered themselves) re¬ 
sembled the court of Alexander the Great. 

This strange inheritance which the dying Byzantine Em¬ 
pire bequeathed to an unsuspecting world continued to live 
with great vigor for six more centuries, amidst the vast plains 
of Russia. The last man to wear the crown with the double 
eagle of Constantinople, Tsar Nicholas, was murdered onl} r 
the other day, so to speak. His body was thrown into a well. 
His son and his daughters were all killed. All his ancient 
rights and prerogatives were abolished, and the Church was 
reduced to the position which it had held in Rome before the 
days of Constantino. 

The western Church, however, fared very differently, as we 
shall see in the next chapter, when the whole Christian world 
was threatened with destruction by the rival creed of an 
Arab camel-driver. 


MOHAMMED 


Since the story of Carthage and Hannibal we have said 
nothing of the Semitic people. You will remember how they 
filled all the chapters devoted to the story of the ancient world. 
The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews, 
the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all of them Semites, had been 
the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty centuries. They 
had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians who had 
come from the east and by the Indo-European Greeks who 
had come from the west. A hundred years after the death of 
Alexander the Great, Carthage, a colony of Semitic Phoeni¬ 
cians, had fought the Indo-European Romans for the mastery 
of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated and de¬ 
stroyed and for eight hundred years the Romans had been mas¬ 
ters of the world. In the seventh century, however, another 
Semitic tribe appeared upon the scene and challenged the 
power of the West. They were the Arabs, peaceful shepherds 
who had roamed through the desert since the beginning of time 
without showing any signs of imperial ambitions. 

Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses, 
and in less than a century they had pushed to the heart of 
Europe and proclaimed the glories of Allah, “the only God,” 
and Mohammed, “the prophet of the only God,” to the fright¬ 
ened peasants of France. 

The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah 
(usually known as Mohammed, or “he who will be praised”), 
reads like a chapter in the “Thousand and One Nights.” He 


129 







130 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


was a camel-driver, born in Mecca. He seems to have been an 
epileptic, and lie suffered from spells of unconsiousness when 
he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of the angel 
Gabriel, whose words were afterward written down in a book 
called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him 
all over Arabia, and he was constantly falling in with Jewish 
merchants and with Christian traders. He came to see that 
the worship of a single God was an excellent thing. His 
own people, the Arabs, still revered queer stones and trunks 
of trees as their ancestors had done, tens of thousands of 
years before. In Mecca stood a little square building, the 
Kaaba, full of idols and strange odds and ends of Hoodoo 

worship. 

Mohammed decided to be the 
Moses of the Arab people. He 
could not well be a prophet and 
a camel-driver at the same time. 
So lie made himself independent 
by marrying his employer, the 
rich widow Cadijah. Then he 
told his neighbors in Mecca that 
he was the long-expected proph¬ 
et sent by Allah to save the 
world. Idle neighbors laughed 
most heartily, and when Moham- 

med continued to annoy them 

•/ 

with his speeches they decided to 
kill him. They regarded him as 
a lunatic and a public bore who deserved no mercy. Mohammed 
heard of the plot, and in the dark of night he lied to Medina 
together with Abu-Bekr, his trusted pupil. This happened 
in the year 622 . It is the most important date in Mohammedan 
history and is known as the Hegira—the year of the Great 
Flight. 

In Medina, Mohammed, who was a stranger, found it easier 
to proclaim himself a prophet than in his home city, where 
everyone had known him as a simple camel-driver. Soon he 



THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED 






MOHAMMED 


131 


was surrounded by an increasing number of followers, or 

Moslems, who accepted the Islam, “the submission to the will 

of God,” which Mohammed praised as the highest of all virtues. 

For seven years he preached to the people of Medina. Then 

he believed himself strong enough to begin a campaign against 

his former neighbors who had dared to sneer at him and his 

holy mission in his old camel-driving days. At the head of 

an army of Medinese he marched across the desert. His fol- 
«/ 

lowers took Mecca without great difficulty, and, having 
slaughtered a number of the inhabitants, they found it quite 
easy to convince the others that Mohammed was really a great 
prophet. From that time on until the year of his death, 
Mohammed was fortunate in everything he undertook. 

There are two reasons for the success of Islam. In the 
first place, the creed which Mohammed taught to his followers 
was very simple. The disciples were told that they must love 
Allah, the Ruler of the World, the Merciful and Compas¬ 
sionate. They must honor and obey their parents. They 
were warned against dishonesty in dealing with their neigh¬ 
bors and were admonished to be humble and charitable to the 
poor and to the sick. Finally they were ordered to abstain 
from strong drink and to be very frugal in what they ate. That 
was all. There were no priests who acted as shepherds of 
their flocks and asked that they he supported at the common 
expense. The Mohammedan churches or mosques were merely 
large stone halls without benches or pictures, where the faith¬ 
ful could gather (if they felt so inclined) to read and discuss 
chapters from the Koran, the Holy Book. But the average 
Mohammedan carried his religion with him and never felt 
himself hemmed in by the restrictions and regulations of an 
established church. Five times a day he turned his face toward 
Mecca, the Holy City, and said a simple prayer. For the 
rest of the time he let Allah rule the world as he saw fit and 
accepted whatever fate brought him with patient resignation. 

Of course such an attitude toward life did not encourage 
the faithful to go forth and invent electrical machinery or 
bother about railroads and steamship lines. But it gave every 


132 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Mohammedan a certain amount of contentment. It bade 
him be at peace with himself and with the world in which he 
lived, and that was a very good thing. 

The second reason for the success of the Moslems 
in their warfare upon the Christians had to do with the con¬ 
duct of those Mohammedan soldiers who went forth to do 
battle for the true faith. The Prophet promised that those 
who fell, facing the enemy, would go directly to Heaven. 
This made sudden death in the field preferable to a long but 
dreary existence upon this earth. It gave the Mohammedans 
an enormous advantage over the Crusaders, who were in con¬ 
stant dread of a dark hereafter and who stuck to the good 
things of this world as long as they possibly could. Incident¬ 
ally it explains why even to-day Moslem soldiers will charge 
into the fire of European machine guns quite indifferent to 
the fate that awaits them and why they are such dangerous 
and persistent enemies. 

Having put his religious house in order, Mohammed now 
began to enjoy his power as the undisputed ruler of a large 
number of Arab tribes. But success has been the undoing of 
a large number of men who were great in the days of adversity. 
He tried to gain the good will of the rich people by a num¬ 
ber of regulations which could appeal to those of wealth. 
He allowed the faithful to have four wives. As one wife 
was a costly investment in those olden days when brides were 
bought directly from the parents, four wives became a positive 
luxury except to those who possessed camels and dromedaries 
and date orchards beyond the dreams of avarice. A religion 
which at first had been meant for the hardy hunters of the 
high-skied desert was gradually transformed to suit the needs 
of the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars of the cities. 
It was a regrettable change from the original program, and it 
did very little good to the cause of Mohammedanism. As for 
the prophet himself, he went on preaching the truth of Allah 
and proclaiming new rules of conduct until he died, quite 
suddenly, of a fever on June the seventh of the year 632 . 

His successor as Caliph (or leader) of the Moslems was 


MOHAMMED 


133 


his father-in-law, Abu-Bekr, who had shared the early dangers 
of the prophet’s life. Two years later Abu-Bekr died, and 
Omar followed him. In less than ten years he conquered 
Egypt, Persia, Phoenicia, Syria, and Palestine, and made 
Damascus the capital of the first Mohammedan world empire. 
Omar was succeeded by Ali, the husband of Mohammed’s 
daughter, Fatima, but a quarrel broke out upon a point of 
Moslem doctrine and Ali was murdered. After his death, 
the caliphate was made hereditary. The leaders of the faith¬ 
ful who had begun their careers as the spiritual heads of a re¬ 
ligious sect became the rulers of a vast empire. They built 
a new city on the shores of the Euphrates, near the ruins of 
Babylon, and called it Bagdad. Organizing the Arab horse¬ 
men into regiments of cavalry, they set forth to bring the 
happiness of their Moslem faith to all unbelievers. 

In the year 700 a.d. a Mohammedan general by the name 



THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN 


THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT 













1.34 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of Tarik crossed the old Gates of Hercules and reached the high 
rock on the European side which he called the Gihel-al-tarik, 
the Hill of Tarik or Gibraltar. Eleven years later he defeated 
the king of the Visigoths. Then the Moslem army moved 
northward and following the route of Hannibal crossed the 
passes of the Pyrenees. They defeated the Duke of Aquitania, 
who tried to halt them near Bordeaux, and marched upon 
Paris. But in the year 732 (one hundred years after the 
death of the prophet), they were beaten in a battle between 
Tours and Poitiers. On that day, Charles Martel (Charles 
the Hammer), the Frankish chieftain, saved Europe from a 
Mohammedan conquest. He drove the Moslems out of France, 
but they maintained themselves in Spain, where the Caliphate 
of Cordova became the greatest center of science and art of 
medieval Europe. 

This Moorish kingdom, so called because the people came 
from Mauretania in Morocco, lasted seven centuries. It was 
only after the capture of Granada, the last Moslem stronghold, 
in the year 1492, that Columbus received the royal grant which 
allowed him to go upon a voyage of discovery. The Moham¬ 
medans soon regained their strength in the new conquests 
which they made in Asia and Africa. To-day there are as 
many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ. 



CHARLEMAGNE 


The battle of Tours had saved Europe from the Mo¬ 
hammedans. But the enemy within—the hopeless disorder 
which had followed the disappearance of the Roman police 

officer—that enemy remained. It is true that the new converts 

•/ 

to the Christian faith in northern Europe felt a deep respect 
for the mighty Bishop of Rome. But that poor bishop did 
not feel any too safe when he looked toward the distant moun¬ 
tains. Heaven knew what fresh hordes of barbarians were 
ready to cross the Alps and begin a new attack on Rome. It 
was necessary—very necessary—for the spiritual head of the 
world to find an ally with a strong sword and a powerful 
fist who was willing to defend His Holiness in case of danger. 

And so the popes, who were not only very holy but 
also very practical, cast about for a friend, and presently 
they made overtures to the most promising of the Germanic 
tribes who had occupied northwestern Europe after the fall 
of Rome. They were called the Franks. One of their earliest 
kings, called Meroveeh, had helped the Romans in the battle of 
tbe Catalaunian fields in the year 451 when they defeated the 
Huns. His descendants, the Merovingians, had continued to 
take little bits of imperial territory until the year 486, when 
King Clovis (the old French word for “Louis”) felt himself 
strong enough to beat the Romans in the open. But his 
descendants were weak men who left the affairs of state to 
their prime minister, the “major domus” or master of the 
palace. 


135 












136 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Pepin the Short, the son of the famous Charles Martel, 
who succeeded his father as master of the palace, hardly 
knew how to handle the situation. His royal master was a 
devout theologian, without any interest in politics. Pepin 
asked the pope for advice. The pope, who was a practical 
person, answered that the “power in the state belonged to him 
who was actually possessed of it.” Pepin took the hint. He 
persuaded Childeric, the last of the Merovingians, to become 
a monk and then made himself king with the approval of the 
other Germanic chieftains. But this did not satisfy the shrewd 
Pepin. He wanted to be something more than a barbarian 
chieftain. He staged an elaborate ceremony at which Boniface, 
the great missionary of the European Northwest, anointed 
him and made him a “King by the grace of God.” It was 
easy to slip those words, “Dei gratia,” into the coronation 
service. It took almost fifteen hundred years to get them out 
again. 

Pepin was sincerely grateful for this kindness on the part 
of the Church. He made two expeditions to Italy to defend 
the pope against his enemies. He took Ravenna and several 
other cities away from the Longobards and presented them 
to His Holiness, who incorporated these new domains into 
the so-called Papal States, which remained an independent 
country until half a century ago. 

After Pepin’s death the relations between Rome and Aix- 
la-Chapelle or Nymwegen or Ingelheim (the Frankish kings 
did not have one official residence, but traveled from place to 
place with all their ministers and court officers) became more 
and more cordial. Finally the pope and the king took a step 
which was to influence the history of Europe in a most pro¬ 
found wav. 

Charles, commonly known as Carolus Magnus or Char¬ 
lemagne, succeeded Pepin in the year 768. He had conquered 
the land of the Saxons in eastern Germany and had built 
towns and monasteries all over the greater part of northern 
Europe. He had invaded Spain to fight the Moors, but in 
the Pyrenees he had been attacked by the wild Basques and 


CHARLEMAGNE 


137 


had been forced to retire. It was upon this occasion that Ro- 



meant when he promised to he faithful to his king, for he gave 
his life and that of his trusted followers to safeguard the re¬ 
treat of the royal army. 

During the last ten years of the eighth century, however, 
Charles was obliged to devote himself exclusively to the affairs 
of Italy. The pope, Leo III, had been attacked by a band 
of Roman rowdies and had been left for dead in the street. 
Some kind people had bandaged his wounds and had helped 
him to escape to the camp of Charles, where he asked for 
help. An army of Franks soon restored quiet and carried Leo 
back to the Lateran Palace, which ever since the days of Con¬ 
stantine had been the home of the pope. That was in Decem¬ 
ber of the year 799. On Christmas day of the next year, 
Charlemagne, who was staying in Rome, attended the service 
in the ancient church of St. Peter. When he arose from prayer, 
the pope placed a crown upon his head, called him emperor of 
the Romans, and hailed him once more with the title of “Augus¬ 
tus,” which had not been heard for hundreds of years. 

Once more northern Europe was part of a Roman Empire, 
but the dignity was held by a German chieftain who could 
read just a little and never learned to write. But he could 
fight, and for a short while there was order. Even the rival 
emperor in Constantinople sent a letter of approval to his 
“dear brother.” 

Unfortunatelv this splendid old man died in the year 814. 
H is sons and his grandsons at once began to fight for the 
largest share of the imperial inheritance. Twice the Caro- 
lingian lands were divided, by the treaties of Verdun in the 
year 843 and by the treaty of Mersen-on-‘the-Meuse in the 
year 870. The latter treaty divided the entire Frankish king¬ 
dom into two parts. 

Charles the Bald received the western half. It contained 
the old Roman province called Gaul, where the language 
of the people had become thoroughly romanized. The Franks 
soon learned to speak this language. This accounts for the 


138 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


strange fact that a largely Germanic land like France should 
speak a Latin tongue. 

The other grandson got the eastern part, the land which 
the Romans had called Germania. Those inhospitable re¬ 
gions had never been part of the old empire. Augustus had 
tried to conquer this “far east,” but his legions had been annihi¬ 
lated in the Teutoburg Wood in the year 9 and the people had 
never been influenced by the higher Roman civilization. They 
spoke the popular Germanic tongue. The Teuton word for 
“people” was “thiot.” The Christian missionaries therefore 
called the German language the “lingua theotisca” or the 
“lingua teutisca,” the “popular dialect,” and this word “teu- 
tisca” was changed into “Deutsch,” which accounts for the 
name “Deutschland.” 

As for the famous imperial crown, it very soon slipped 
off the heads of the Carolingian successors and rolled back onto 
the Italian plain, where it became a sort of plaything of a 
number of little potentates who stole the crown from each other 
amidst much bloodshed and wore it (with or without the per¬ 
mission of the pope) until it was the turn of some more am¬ 
bitious neighbor. The pope, once more sorely beset by his 
enemies, sent north for help. He did not appeal to the ruler 
of the west-Frankish kingdom, this time. His messengers 
crossed the Alps and addressed themselves to Otto, a Saxon 
Prince who was recognized as the greatest chieftain of the 
different Germanic tribes. 

Otto, who shared his people’s affection for the blue skies 
and the gay and beautiful people of the Italian peninsula, 
hastened to the rescue. In return for his services, the pope, 
Leo A III, made Otto “Emperor,” and the eastern half of 
Charles’s old kingdom was henceforth known as the “Holy 
Roman Empire of the German Nation.” 

This strange political creation managed to live to the ripe 
old age of eight hundred and thirty-nine years. In the year 
1801 (during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson), it was 
most unceremoniously relegated to the historical scrapheap. 
The brutal fellow who destroyed the old Germanic Empire was 



THE MOUNTAIN PASS 


































































































140 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the son of a Corsican notary public who had made a brilliant 
career in the service of the French republic. Napoleon was ruler 
of Europe by the grace of his famous Guard Regiments, but 
he desired to be something more. He sent to Rome for the 
pope and the pope came and stood by while Napoleon placed 
the imperial crown upon his own head and proclaimed himself 
heir to the tradition of Charlemagne. For history is like 
life. The more things change, the more they remain the same. 



THE NORSEMEN 


In the third and fourth centuries, the Germanic tribes of 
central Europe had broken through the defences of the Em¬ 
pire that they might plunder Rome and live on the fat of the 
land. In the eighth century it became the turn of the Germans 
to be the plundered ones. They did not like this at all, even 
if their enemies were their first cousins, the Norsemen, who 
lived in Denmark and Sweden and Norwav. 

What forced these hardy sailors to turn pirate we do not 
know, but once they had discovered the advantages and pleas¬ 
ures of a buccaneering career there was no one who could stop 
them. They would suddenly descend upon a peaceful Erank- 
ish or Frisian village, situated on the mouth of a river. They 
would kill all the men and steal all the women. Then they 
would sail away in their fast-sailing ships and when the sol¬ 
diers of the king or emj^eror arrived upon the scene, the rob¬ 
bers were gone and nothing remained but a few smoldering 
ruins. 

During the days of disorder which followed the death of 
Charlemagne, the Norsemen developed great activity. Their 
fleets made raids upon every country and their sailors estab¬ 
lished small independent kingdoms along the coast of Holland 
and France and England and Germany, and they even found 
their way into Italy. The Norsemen were very intelligent. 
They soon learned to speak the language of their subjects and 
gave up the uncivilized ways of the early Vikings (or Sea- 
Kings ), who had been very picturesque but also very unwashed 
and terriblv cruel. 


141 







THE STORY OF MANKIND 


142 


Early in the tenth century a Viking by the name of Hollo 
had repeatedly attacked the coast of France. The king of 
France, too weak to resist these northern robbers, tried to 
bribe them into “being good.” He offered them the province 



THE HOME OF THE NORSEMEN 

of Normandy, if they would promise to stop bothering the rest 
of his domains. Hollo accepted this bargain and became “Duke 
of Normandy.” 

But the passion of conquest was strong in the blood of his 
children. Across the channel, only a few hours away from the 
European mainland, they could see the white cliffs and the 
green fields of England. Poor England had passed through 
difficult days. For two hundred years it had been a Homan 











THE NORSEMEN 


143 



THE NORSEMEN GO TO RUSSIA 


colony. After the Romans left, it had been conquered hy the 
Angles and the Saxons, two German tribes from Schleswig. 
Next the Danes had taken the greater part of the country 
and had established the kingdom of Knut. The Danes had 
been driven away and now (it was early in the eleventh cen¬ 
tury) another Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, was on the 



THE NORMANS LOOK ACROSS THE CHANNEL 

















THE WORLD OF THE NORSEMEN 


















THE NORSEMEN 


145 


throne. But Edward was not expected to live long, and lie 
had no children. The circumstances favored the ambitious 
dukes of Normandy. 

In 1066 Edward died. Immediately William of Nor¬ 
mandy crossed the channel, defeated and killed Harold of 
Wessex (who had taken the crown) at the battle of Hastings, 
and proclaimed himself king of England. 

In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a 
German chieftain had become a Roman emperor. Now in 
the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognized 
as king of England. 

Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth 
of history is so much more interesting and entertaining? 


FEUDALISM 


The following, then, is the state of Europe in the year one 
thousand, when most people were so unhappy that they wel¬ 
comed the prophecy foretelling the approaching end of the 
world and rushed to the monasteries, that the Day of Judg¬ 
ment might find them engaged upon devout duties. 

At an unknown period, the Germanic tribes had left their 
old home in Asia and had moved westward into Europe. By 
sheer pressure of numbers they had forced their way into the 
Roman Empire. They had destroyed the great western em¬ 
pire, but the eastern part, being off the main route of the 
great migrations, had managed to survive and feebly continued 
the traditions of Rome’s ancient glory. 

During the days of disorder which had followed (the true 
“dark ages” of history, the sixth and seventh centuries of our 
era), the German tribes had been persuaded to accept the 
Christian religion and had recognized the Bishop of Rome 
as the pope or spiritual head of the world. In the ninth cen¬ 
tury, the organizing genius of Charlemagne had revived the 
Roman Empire and had united the greater part of western 
Europe into a single state. During the tenth century this 
empire had gone to pieces. The western part had become a 
separate kingdom, France. The eastern half was known as the 
Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and the rulers of 
this federation of states then pretended that they were the 
direct heirs of Ca3sar and Augustus. 

Unfortunately the power of the kings of France did not 
stretch beyond the moat of their royal residence, while the 


146 







FEUDALISM 


14? 

Holy Roman Emperor was openly defied by his powerful sub¬ 
jects whenever it suited their fancy or their profit. 

To increase the misery of the masses of the people, the tri¬ 
angle of western Europe was forever exposed to attacks from 
three sides. On the south lived the ever-dangerous Moham¬ 
medans. The western coast was ravaged by the Norsemen. 
The eastern frontier (defenseless except for the short stretch 
of the Carpathian Mountains) was at the mercy of hordes of 
Huns, Hungarians, Slavs, and Tartars. 

The peace of Rome was a thing of the remote past, a dream 
of the “good old days” that were gone forever. It was a 
question of “fight or die,” and quite naturally people preferred 
to fight. Forced by circumstances, Europe became an armed 
camp and there was a demand for strong leadership. Both 
king and emperor were far away. The frontiersmen (and 
most of Europe in the year 1000 was “frontier”) must help 
themselves. They willingly submitted to the representatives 
of the king who were sent to administer the outlying dis¬ 
tricts, provided they could protect them against tlieir enemies. 

Soon central Europe was dotted with small principalities, 
each one ruled by a duke or a count or a baron or a bishop, as 
the case might be, and organized as a fighting unit. These 
dukes and counts and barons had sworn to be faithful to the 
king who had given them their “feudum” (hence our word 
“feudal”) in return for their loyal services and a certain 
amount of taxes. But travel in those days was slow and the 
means of communication were exceedingly poor. The royal 
or imperial administrators therefore enjoyed great independ¬ 
ence, and within the boundaries of their own provinces they 
assumed most of the rights which in truth belonged to the king. 

But you would make a mistake if you supposed that the 
people of the eleventh century objected to this form of gov¬ 
ernment. They supported feudalism because it was a very 
practical and necessary institution. Their lord and master 
usually lived in a big stone house erected on the top of a steep 
rock or built between deep moats, but within sight of his 
subjects. In case of danger the subjects found shelter behind 



THE NORSEMEN ARE COMING 












































FEUDALISM 


149 


the walls of the baronial stronghold. That is why they tried 
to live as near the castle as possible and it accounts for the 
many European cities which began their career around a feudal 


fortress. 

But the knight of the early middle ages was much more 
than a professional soldier. lie was the civil servant of that 
day. He was the judge of his community and he was the chief 
of police. He caught the highwaymen and protected the wan¬ 
dering pedlars who were the merchants of the eleventh century. 


He looked after the dikes so that the countryside should not 
be flooded (just as the first noblemen had done in the valley 
ot the Nile four thousand years before). He encouraged 
the troubadours who wandered from place to place telling 
tlie stories of the ancient heroes who had fought in the great 


wars of the migrations. Besides, he protected the churches 
and the monasteries within his territory, and although he could 
neither read nor write (it was considered unmanly to know 
such things) he employed a number of priests who kept his ac¬ 
counts and who registered the marriages and the births and the 
deaths that occurred within the baronial or ducal domains. 

In the fifteenth century the kings once more became strong 
enough to exercise those powers which belonged to them because 
they were “anointed of God.” Then the feudal knights lost 
their former independence. Reduced to the rank of country 
squires, they no longer filled a need, and soon they became a 
nuisance. But Europe would have perished without the “feu¬ 
dal system” of the dark ages. There were many bad knights, 
as there are many bad people to-day. But generally speaking, 
the rough-fisted barons of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
were hard-working administrators who rendered a most useful 
service to the cause of progress. During that era the noble 
torch of learning and art which had illuminated the world of 
the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans was burning 
very low. Without the knights and their good friends, the 
monks, civilization would have been extinguished entirely, and 
the human race would have been forced to begin once more 
where the cave man had left off. 


CHIVALRY 


It was quite natural that the professional fighting men of 
the middle ages should try to establish some sort of organiza¬ 
tion for their mutual benefit and protection. Out of this need 
for close organization, knighthood or chivalry was born. 

We know very little about the origins of knighthood. But 
as the system developed, it gave the world something which it 
needed very badly—a definite rule of conduct which softened 
the barbarous customs of that day and made life more livable 
than it had been during the five hundred years of the dark 
. ages. It was not an easy task to civilize the rough frontiers¬ 
men who had spent most of their time fighting Mohammedans 
and Huns and Norsemen. Often they were guilty of back¬ 
sliding, and, having vowed all sorts of oaths about mercy and 
charity in the morning, they would murder all their prisoners 
before evening. But progress is ever the result of slow and 
ceaseless labor, and finally the most unscrupulous of knights 
was forced to obey the rules of his “class” or suffer the con¬ 
sequences. 

These rules were different in the various parts of Europe, 
but they all made much of “service” and “loyalty to duty.” The 
middle ages regarded service as something very noble and 
beautiful. It was no disgrace to be a servant, provided you 
were a good servant and did not slacken on the job. As for 
loyalty, at a time when life depended upon the faithful per¬ 
formance of many unpleasant duties, it was the chief virtue 
of the fighting man. 


150 








CHIVALRY 


151 


A young knight therefore was asked to swear that he would 
be faithful as a servant to God and as a servant to his king. 
Furthermore, he promised to be generous to those whose need 
was greater than his own. He pledged his word that he would 
be humble in his personal behavior and would never boast of 
his own accomplishments and that he would be a friend of all 
those who suffered (with the exception of the Mohammedans, 
whom he was expected to kill on sight). 

Around these vows, which were merely the Ten Command¬ 
ments expressed in terms which the people of the middle ages 
could understand, there developed a complicated system of 
manners and outward behavior. The knights tried to model 
their own lives after the example of those heroes of Arthur’s 
Round Table and Charlemagne’s court of whom the trouba¬ 
dours had told them and of whom you may read in many de¬ 
lightful books which are enumerated at the end of this volume. 
They hoped that they might prove as brave as Lancelot and 
as faithful as Roland. They carried themselves with dignitv 
and they spoke careful and gracious words that they might be 
known as true knights, however humble the cut of their coats 
or the size of their purses. 

In this way the order of knighthood became a school of those 
good manners which are the oil of the social machinery. Chiv- 
alrv came to mean courtesv and the feudal castle showed the 

•J * 

rest of the world what clothes to wear, how to eat, how to ask 
a lady for a dance, and the thousand and one little things of 
everyday behavior which help to make life interesting and 
agreeable. 

Like all human institutions, knighthood was doomed to 
perish as soon as it had outlived its usefulness. 

The Crusades, about which one of the next chapters tells, 
were followed by a great revival of trade. Cities grew over¬ 
night. The townspeople became rich, hired good school teach¬ 
ers, and soon were the equals of the knights. The invention 
of gunpowder deprived the heavily armed “chevalier” of his 
former advantage and the use of mercenaries made it impos¬ 
sible to conduct a battle with the delicate niceties of a chess 


152 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


tournament. The knight became superfluous. Soon he be¬ 
came a ridiculous figure, with his devotion to ideals that had no 
longer any practical value. It was said that the noble Don 
Quixote had been the last of the true knights. After his death, 
his trusted sword and his armor were sold to pay his debts. 

But somehow or other that sword seems to have fallen into 
the hands of a number of men. Washington carried it during 
the hopeless days of Valley Forge. It was the only defense 
of Gordon, when he had refused to desert the people who had 
been entrusted to his care, and stayed to meet his death in the 
besieged fortress of Khartoum. 

And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable 
strength in winning the Great War. 


POPE vs. EMPEROR 


It is very difficult to understand the people of bygone 
ages. Your own grandfather, whom you see every day, is a 
mysterious being who lives in a different world of ideas and 
clothes and manners. I am now telling you the story of some 
of your grandfathers who are twenty-five generations removed, 
and I do not expect you to catch the meaning of what I write 
without re-reading this chapter a number of times. 

The average man of the middle ages lived a very simple 
and uneventful life. Even if he was a free citizen, able to 
come and go at will, he rarely left his own neighborhood. 
There were no printed books and only a few manuscripts. 
Here and there, a small hand of industrious monks taught 
reading and writing and some arithmetic. But science and his¬ 
tory and geography lay buried beneath the ruins of Greece and 
Rome. 

Whatever people knew about the past they had learned by 
listening to stories and legends. Such information, which goes 
from father to son, is often slightly incorrect in details, but 
it will preserve the main facts of history with astonishing accu¬ 
racy. After more than two thousand years, the mothers of 
India still frighten their naughty children by telling them that 
“Iskander will get them,” and Iskander is none other than 
Alexander the Great, who visited India in the vear 330 before 
the birth of Christ but whose story has lived through all these 
ages. 


153 









154 


THE STORY OE MANKIND 


The people of the early middle ages never saw a text¬ 
book of Roman history. They were ignorant of many things 
which every schoolboy to-day knows before he has entered 
the seventh grade. But the Roman Empire, which is merely a 
name to you, was to them something very much alive. They 
felt it. They willingly recognized the pope as their spiritual 
leader because he lived in Rome and represented the idea of 
the Roman super-power. And they were profoundly grate¬ 
ful when Charlemagne, and afterward Otto the Great, re¬ 
vived the idea of a world-empire and created the Holy Roman 
Empire, that the world might again be as it always had been. 

But the fact that there were two different heirs to the 
Roman tradition placed the faithful burghers of the middle 
ages in a difficult position. The theory behind the medieval 
political system was both sound and simple. While the worldly 
master (the emperor) looked after the physical well-being of 
his subjects, the spiritual master (the pope) guarded their 
souls. 

In practice, however, the system worked very badly. The 
emperor invariably tried to interfere with the affairs of the 
Church and the pope retaliated and told the emperor how 
he should rule his domains. Then they told each other to mind 
their own business in very unceremonious language, and the 
inevitable end was war. 

In those circumstances, what were the people to do? A 
good Christian obeyed both the jjope and his king. But the 
pope and the emperor were enemies. Which side should a duti¬ 
ful subject and an equally dutiful Christian take? 

It was never easy to give the correct answer. When the 
emperor happened to be a man of energy and was sufficiently 
well provided with money to organize an army, he was very 
apt to cross the Alps and march on Rome, besiege the pope 
in his own palace if need be, and force His Holiness to obey 
the imperial instructions or suffer the consequences. 

But more frequently the pope was the stronger. Then the 
emperor or the king together with all his subjects was excom¬ 
municated. This meant that all churches were closed, that no 


POPE vs. EMPEROR 


155 


one could be baptized, that no dying’ man could be given abso¬ 
lution—in short, that half of the functions of medieval govern¬ 
ment came to an end. 

More than that, the people were absolved from their oath of 
loyalty to their sovereign and were urged to rebel against their 
master. But if they followed this advice of the distant pope 
and were caught, they were hanged by their near-by liege 
lord, and that too was very unpleasant. 

Indeed, the poor fellows were in a difficult position and 
none fared worse than those who lived during the latter half of 
the eleventh century, when the Emperor Henry IV of Ger¬ 
many and Pope Gregory VII fought a two-round battle which 
decided nothing and upset the peace of Europe for almost fifty 
years. 

In the middle of the eleventh century there had been a 
strong movement for reform in the Church. The election of the 
pope, thus far, had been a most irregular affair. It was to the 
advantage of the Holy Roman Emperors to have a well-dis¬ 
posed priest elected to the Holy See. They frequently came 
to Rome at the time of election and used their influence for 
the benefit of one of their friends. 

In the year 1059 this had been changed. By a decree of 
Pope Nicholas II the principal priests and deacons of the 
churches in and around Rome were organized into the so-called 
college of cardinals, and this gathering of prominent church¬ 
men (the word “cardinal” meant principal) was given the 
exclusive power of electing the future popes. 

In the year 1073 the college of cardinals elected a priest 
by the name of Hildebrand, the son of very simple parents in 
Tuscany, as pope, and he took the name of Gregory VII. 
His energy was unbounded. His belief in the supreme powers 
of his holy office was built upon a granite rock of conviction 
and courage. In the mind of Gregory, the pope was not only 
the absolute head of the Christian Church, but also the highest 
court of appeal in all worldly matters. The pope who had 
elevated simple German princes to the dignity of emperor 
could depose them at will. He could veto any law passed by 




THE CASTLE 









































POPE vs. EMPEROR 


157 


duke or king or emperor, but whosoever should question a 
papal decree, let him beware, for the punishment would be 
swift and merciless. 

Gregory sent ambassadors to all the European courts to 
inform the potentates of Europe of his new laws and asked 
them to take due notice of their contents. William the Con¬ 
queror promised to be good, but Henry IV, who since the age 
of six had been fighting with his subjects, had no intention of 
submitting to the papal will. He called together a college of 
German bishops, accused Gregory of every crime under the 
sun, and then had him deposed by the council of Worms. 

The pope answered with excommunication and a demand 
that the German princes rid themselves of their unworthy ruler. 
The German princes, happy to be rid of Henry, asked the pope 
to come to Augsburg and help them elect a new emperor. 

Gregory left Rome and 
traveled northward. Henry, 
who was no fool, appreciated 
the danger of his position. At 
all costs he must make peace 
with the pope, and he must do 
it at once. In the midst of win¬ 
ter he crossed the Alps and 
hastened to Canossa, where the 
pope had stopped for a short 
rest. Three long days, from 
the 25th to the 28th of January 
of the year 1077, Henry, 
dressed as a penitent pilgrim 
(but with a warm sweater un¬ 
derneath his monkish garb), waited outside the gates of the 
castle of Canossa. Then he was allowed to enter and was 
pardoned for his sins. Rut the repentance did not last long. 
As soon as Henry had returned to Germany, he behaved 
exactly as before. Again he was excommunicated. For the 
second time a council of German bishops deposed Gregory, 
but this time Henry crossed the Alps at the head of a large 










158 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


army, besieged Rome, and forced Gregory to retire to Salerno, 
where lie died in exile. This first violent outbreak decided 
nothing. As soon as Henry was hack in Germany, the strug¬ 
gle between pope and emperor was continued. 

The Hohenstaufen family, which got hold of the imperial 
German throne shortly afterward, were even more independ¬ 
ent than their predecessors. Gregory had claimed that the 
popes were superior to all kings because they (the popes) at 
the Day of Judgment would he responsible for the behavior 
of all the sheep of their flock, and in the eyes of God a king 
was one of that faithful herd. 

Frederick of Hohenstaufen, commonly known as Barba- 
rossa or Red Beard, set up the counterclaim that the empire 
had been bestowed upon his predecessor “by God himself,” 
and as the empire included Italy and Rome, he began a cam¬ 
paign which was to add these “lost provinces” to the northern 
country. Barbarossa was accidentally drowned in Asia Minor 
during the second Crusade, but his son Frederick II, a brilliant 
young man who in his youth had been exposed to the civiliza¬ 
tion of the Mohammedans of Sicily, continued the war. The 
popes accused him of heresy. It is true that Frederick seems 
to have felt a deep and serious contempt for the rough Chris¬ 
tian world of the North, for the boorish German knights, and 
the intriguing Italian priests. But he held his tongue, went 
on a Crusade and took Jerusalem from the infidel, and was 
duly crowned as king of the Holy City. Even this act did not 
placate the pope. He deposed Frederick and gave his 
Italian possessions to Charles of Anjou, the brother of that 
King Louis of France who became famous as Saint Louis. 
This led to more warfare. Conrad V, the last of the ILohen- 
staufens, tried to regain the kingdom and was defeated and 
decapitated at Naples. But twenty years later the French, 
who had made themselves unpopular in Sicily, were all mur¬ 
dered during the so-called Sicilian Vespers; and so it went. 

The quarrel between the popes and the emperors was 
never settled, but after a while the two enemies learned to 
leave each other alone. k 


POPE vs. EMPEROR 


159 


In the year 1273, Rudolph of Hapsburg was elected em¬ 
peror. He did not take the trouble to go to Rome to be 
crowned. The pope did not object, and in turn he kept 
away from Germany. This meant peace; but two entire cen¬ 
turies, which might have been used for the purpose of internal 
organization, had been wasted in useless warfare. 

It is an ill wind, however, that bloweth no good to some one. 
The little cities of Italy, by a process of careful balancing, 
had managed to increase their power and their independence 
at the expense of both emperors and popes. When the rush 
for the Holy Land began, they were able to handle the trans¬ 
portation problem of the thousands of eager pilgrims who were 
clamoring for passage, and at the end of the Crusades they 
had built themselves such strong defences of brick and of gold 
that they could defy pope and emperor with equal indifference. 

Church and State fought each other, and a third party—the 
medieval city—ran away with the spoils. 



THE CRUSADES 


During three centuries there had been peace between Chris¬ 
tians and Moslems except in Spain and in the eastern Roman 
Empire, the two states defending the gateways of Europe. 
The Mohammedans, having conquered Syria in the seventh 
century, were in possession of the Holy Land. But they re¬ 
garded Jesus as a great prophet (though not quite as great 
as Mohammed), and they did not interfere with the pilgrims 
who wished to pray in the church which Saint Helena, the 
mother of the Emperor Constantine, had built on the spot of 
the Holy Grave. But early in the eleventh century, a Tartar 
tribe from the wilds of Asia, called the Turks, became masters 
of the Mohammedan state in western Asia and then the period 
of tolerance came to an end. The Turks took all of Asia 
Minor away from the eastern Roman emperors and made an 
end to the trade between East and West. 

The Emperor Alexis, who rarely saw anything of his Chris¬ 
tian neighbors of the West, appealed for help and pointed to 
the danger which threatened Europe should the Turks take 
Constantinople. 

The Italian cities which had established colonies along the 
coast of Asia Minor and Palestine, in fear for their posses¬ 
sions, reported terrible stories of Turkish atrocities and Chris¬ 
tian suffering. All Europe got excited. 

Pope Urban II, a Frenchman, who had been educated at 
the same famous cloister which had trained Gregory VII, 
thought that the time had come for action. The general state 


160 







THE CRUSADES 


161 


of Europe was far from satisfactory. The primitive agricul¬ 
tural methods of that day (unchanged since Roman times) 
caused a constant scarcity of food. There were unemployment 
and hunger and these are apt to lead to discontent and riots. 
Western Asia in older days had fed millions. It was an ex¬ 
cellent field for the purpose of immigration. 

Therefore, at the council of Clermont in France in the year 

%/ 

1095 the pope arose, described the horrors which the infidels 
had inflicted upon the Holy Land, gave a glowing description 
of this country which ever since the days of Moses had been 
overflowing with milk and honey, and exhorted the knights of 
France and the people of Europe in general to leave wife and 
child and deliver Palestine from the Turks. 

A wave of religious hysteria swept across the continent. 
All reason stopped. Men would drop their hammers and saws, 
walk out of their shops, and take the nearest road to the East 
to go and kill Turks. Children would leave their homes to “go 
to Palestine” and bring the terrible Turks to their knees by 
the mere appeal of their youthful zeal and Christian piety. 
Fully ninety per cent of those enthusiasts never got within 
sight of the Holy Land. They had no money. They were 
forced to beg or steal to keep alive. They became a danger 
to the safety of the highroads, and they were killed by the 
angry country people. 

The first Crusade, a wild mob of honest Christians, default¬ 
ing bankrupts, penniless noblemen, and fugitives from justice, 
following the lead of half-crazy Peter the Hermit and Walter- 
without-a-Cent, began their campaign against the Infidels by 
murdering all the Jews whom they met by the way. They 
got as far as Hungary, and then they were all killed. 

This experience taught the Church a lesson. Enthusiasm 
alone would not set the Holy Land free. Organization was 
as necessary as good will and courage. A year was spent in 
training and equipping an army of 200,000 men. They were 
placed under command of Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert, duke 
of Normandy, Robert, count of Flanders, and a number of 
other noblemen, all experienced in the art of war. 


162 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


In the year 1096 this second Crusade started upon its long 
voyage. At Constantinople the knights did homage to the 
emperor. (For as I have told you, traditions die hard, and 
a Roman emperor, however poor and powerless, was still held 
in great respect.) Then they crossed into Asia, killed all the 



THE FIRST CRUSADE 


Moslems who fell into their hands, stormed Jerusalem, mas¬ 
sacred the Mohammedan population, and marched to the Holy 
Sepulchre to give praise and thanks amidst tears of piety and 
gratitude. But soon the Turks were strengthened by the arriv¬ 
al of fresh troops. Then they retook Jerusalem and in turn 
killed the faithful followers of the Cross. 

During the next two centuries, seven other Crusades took 
place. Gradually the Crusaders learned the technique of the 
trip. The land voyage was too tedious and too dangerous. 
They preferred to cross the Alps and go to Genoa or Venice, 
where they took ship for the east. The Genoese and the Vene¬ 
tians made this trans-Mediterranean passenger service a very 
profitable business. They charged exorbitant rates, and when 
the Crusaders (most of whom had very little money) could not 



















164 


THE STORY OE MANKIND 


pay the price, these Italian “profiteers’ 5 kindly allowed them 
to “work their way across.” In return for a fare from Venice 
to Acre, the Crusader undertook to do a stated amount of 
fighting for the owners of his vessel. In this way Venice 
greatly increased her territory along the coast of the Adriatic 
and in Greece, where Athens became a Venetian colony, and in 
the islands of Cyprus and Crete and Rhodes. 

All this, however, helped 
little in settling the question 
of the Holy Land. After 
the first enthusiasm had 
worn off, a short crusading 
trip became part of the lib¬ 
eral education of every well- 
bred young man, and there 

never was any lack of can- 

•/ 

didates for service in Pales¬ 
tine. But the old zeal was 
gone. The Crusaders, who 
had begun their warfare 
with deep hatred for the 
Mohammedans and great 
love for the Christian peo¬ 
ple of the eastern Roman 
Empire and Armenia, suf¬ 
fered a complete change of heart. They came to despise the 
Greeks of Byzantium, who cheated them and frequently be¬ 
trayed the cause of the Cross, and the Armenians and all the 
other Levantine races, and they began to appreciate the vir¬ 
tues of their enemies, who proved to be generous and fair 
opponents. 

Of course, it would never do to say this openly. But when 

the Crusader returned home, he was likelv to imitate the man- 

•/ 

ners which he had learned from his heathenish foe, compared 
to whom the average western knight was still a good deal of a 
country bumpkin. He also brought with him several new 
food-stuffs, such as peaches and spinach, which he planted in 



THE CRUSADERS TAKE JERUSALEM 


























THE CRUSADES 


1G5 


his garden and grew for his own benefit. He gave up the bar¬ 
barous custom of wearing a load of heavy armor and appeared 
in the flowing robes of silk or cotton which were the traditional 
habit of the followers of the Prophet and were originally worn 
by the Turks. Indeed the Crusades, which had begun as a puni¬ 
tive expedition against the Heathen, became a course of gener¬ 
al instruction in civilization for millions of young Europeans. 

From a military and politi¬ 
cal point of view the Crusades 
were a failure. Jerusalem and 
a number of cities were taken 
and lost. A dozen little king¬ 
doms were established in Syria 

*/ 

and Palestine and Asia Minor, 
hut they were reconquered by 
the Turks and after the year 
1244 (when Jerusalem became 
definitely Turkish) the status 
of the Holy Land was the same 
as it had been before 1095. 

But Europe had undergone 
a great change. The people of 
the West had been allowed a glimpse of the light and the sun¬ 
shine and the beauty of the East. Their dreary castles no 
longer satisfied them. They wanted a broader life. Neither 

O *- 

Church nor State could give this to them. 

They found it in the cities. 



THE CRUSADER’S GRAVE 


« 




THE MEDIEVAL CITY 


The early part of the middle ages had been an era of 
pioneering and of settlement. A new people, who thus far 
had lived outside the wild range of forest, mountains, and 
marshes which protected the northeastern frontier of the Ro¬ 
man Empire, had forced its way into the plains of western 
Europe and had taken possession of most of the land. They 
were restless, as all pioneers have been since the beginning of 
time. They liked to be “on the go.” They cut down the 
forests and they cut each other’s throats with equal energy. 
Few of them wanted to live in cities. They insisted upon being 
“free.” They loved to feel the fresh air of the hillsides till their 
lungs while they drove their herds across the wind-swept pas¬ 
tures. When they no longer liked their old homes, they pulled 
up stakes and went away in search of fresh adventures. 

The weaker ones died. The hardy fighters and the cou¬ 
rageous women who had followed their men into the wilder¬ 
ness survived. In this way they developed a strong race of 
men. They cared little for the graces of life. They were too 
busy to play the fiddle or write pieces of poetry. They had 
little love for discussions. The priest, “the learned man” of the 
village (and before the middle of the thirteenth century, a lay¬ 
man who could read and write was regarded as a“sissy”), was 
supposed to settle all questions which had no direct practical 
value. Meanwhile the German chieftain, the Frankish baron, 
the Northman duke (or whatever their names and titles) occu¬ 
pied their share of the territory which once had been part of 


166 










THE MEDIEVAL CITY 


167 


the great Roman Empire, and among the ruins of past glory 
they built a world of their own which pleased them mightily 
and which they considered quite perfect. 

They managed the affairs of their castles and the surround¬ 
ing country to the best of their ability. They were as faithful 
to the commandments of the Church as any weak mortal could 
hope to be. They were sufficiently loyal to their king or em¬ 
peror to keep on good terms with those distant but always dan¬ 
gerous potentates. In short, they tried to do right and to be 
fair to their neighbors without being exactly unfair to their 
own interests. 

It was not an ideal world in which they found themselves. 
The greater part of the people were serfs or “villeins,” farm¬ 
hands who were as much a part of the soil upon which they 
lived as the cows and sheep whose stables they shared. Their 
fate was not particularly happy nor was it particularly un¬ 
happy. But what was one to do? The good Lord who ruled 
the world of the middle ages had undoubtedly ordered every¬ 
thing for the best. If He, in his wisdom, had decided that 
there must be both knights and serfs, it was not the duty of 
these faithful sons of the Church to question the arrangement. 
The serfs, therefore, did not complain, but when they were too 
hard driven thev would die off like cattle which are not fed 
and stabled in the right way, and then something would be has¬ 
tily done to better their condition. But if the progress of the 
world had been left to the serf and his feudal master, we would 
still be living after the fashion of the twelfth century, saying 
“abracadabra” when we tried to stop a toothache, and feeling 
a deep contempt and hatred for the dentist who offered to help 
us with his “science,” which most likelv was of Mohammedan 
or heathenish origin and therefore both wicked and useless. 

When you grow up you will discover that many people do 
not believe in “progress,” and they will prove to you by the 
terrible deeds of some of our own contemporaries that “the 
world does not change.” But I hope that you will not pay 
much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors 
almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. 


168 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts 
developed into an understandable language. Writing—the art 
of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, 
without which no progress is possible—was invented only four 
thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of nature 
into the obedient servants of man was quite new in the days of 
your own grandfather. It seems to me, therefore, that we are 
making progress at an unheard-of rate of speed. Perhaps we 
have paid a little too much attention to the mere physical com¬ 
forts of life. That will change in due course of time and we 
shall then attack the problems which are not related to health 
and to wages and plumbing and machinery in general. 

But please do not be too sentimental about the “good old 
days.” Many people who only see the beautiful churches and 
the great works of art which the middle ages have left behind 
grow quite eloquent when they compare our own ugly civiliza¬ 
tion with its hurry and its noise and the evil smells of back¬ 
firing motor trucks with the cities of a thousand years ago. 
But these medieval churches were invariably surrounded by 
miserable hovels compared to which a modern tenement house 
stands forth as a luxurious palace. It is true that the noble 
Lancelot and the equally noble Parsifal, the pure young hero 
who went in search of the Holy Grail, were not bothered by 
the odor of gasoline. But there were other smells of the barn¬ 
yard variety—odors of decaying refuse which had been thrown 
into the street, of pigsties surrounding the bishop’s palace, 
of unwashed people who had inherited their coats and hats 
from their grandfathers and who had never learned the bless¬ 
ing of soap. I do not want to paint too unpleasant a picture. 
But when you read in the ancient chronicles that the king of 
France, looking out of the windows of his palace, fainted at 
the stench caused by the pigs rooting in the streets of Paris, 
when an ancient manuscript recounts a few details of an epi¬ 
demic of the plague or of smallpox, then you begin to under¬ 
stand that “progress” is something more than a catchword 
used by modern advertising men. 

No, the progress of the last six hundred years would not 





THE MEDIEVAL CITY 


169 


have been possible without the existence of cities. I shall, 
therefore, have to make this chapter a little longer than many 
of the others. It is too important to be reduced to three or 
four pages, devoted to mere political events. 

The ancient world of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria 
had been a world of cities. Greece had been a country of city- 
states. The history of Phoenicia was the history of two cities 
called Sidon and Tyre. The Roman Empire was the “hinter¬ 
land” of a single town. Writing, art, science, architecture, liter¬ 
ature, the theater—the list is endless—have all been products of 
the city. 

For almost four thousand years the wooden beehive which 
we call a town had been the workshop of the world. Then came 
the great migrations. The Roman Empire was destroyed. 
"Tlie cities were burned down, and Europe once more became a 
land of pastures and little agricultural villages. During the 
dark ages the fields of civilization had lain fallow. 

The Crusades had prepared the soil for a new crop. It 
was time for the harvest, but the fruit was plucked by the 
burghers of the free cities. 

I have told you the story of the castles and the monasteries, 
with their heavy stone enclosures—the homes of the knights 
and the monks, who guarded men’s bodies and their souls. 
You have seen how a few artisans (butchers and bakers and an 
occasional candlestick maker) came to live near the castle, 
to attend to the wants of their masters and to find protection 
in case of danger. Sometimes the feudal lord allowed these 
people to surround their houses with a stockade. But they 
were dependent for their living upon the good will of the 
mighty Seigneur of the castle. When he went about they knelt 
before him and kissed his hand. 

Then came the Crusades, and many things changed. The 
migrations had driven people from the northeast to the west. 
The Crusades made millions of people travel from the west to 
the highly civilized regions of the southeast. They discovered 
that the world was not bounded by the four walls of their little 
settlements. They came to appreciate better clothes, more com- 





170 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


fortable houses, new dishes, products of the mysterious Orient. 
After their return to their old homes, they insisted that they 
he supplied with those articles. The pedlar with his pack 
upon his back—the only merchant of the dark ages—added 
these goods to his old merchandise, bought a cart, hired a few 
ex-Crusaders to protect him against the crime wave which fol¬ 
lowed this great international war, and went forth to do busi¬ 
ness upon a more modern and larger scale. His career was 
not an easy one. Every time he entered the domains of an¬ 
other lord he had to pay tolls and taxes. But the business 
was profitable all the same, and the pedlar continued to make 
his rounds. 

Soon certain energetic merchants discovered that the goods 
which they had always imported from afar could he made at 
home. They turned part of their homes into a workshop. 
They ceased to be merchants and became manufacturers. They 
sold their products not only to the lord of the castle and to the 
abbot in his monastery, but they exported them to near-by 
towns. The lord and the abbot paid them with products of 
their farms, eggs and wines, and with honey, which in those 
early days was used as sugar. But the citizens of distant 
towns were obliged to pay in cash, and the manufacturer and 
the merchant began to own little pieces of gold, which entirely 
changed their position in the society of the early middle ages. 

It is difficult for you to imagine a world without money. 
In a modern city one cannot possibly live without money. All 
day long you carry a pocket full of small discs of metal to 
“pay your way.” You need a nickel for the street-car, a dollar 
for a dinner, three cents for an evening paper. But many 
people of the early middle ages never saw a piece of coined 
money from the time they were born to the day of their death. 
The gold and silver of Greece and Rome lay buried beneath 
the ruins of their cities. The world of the migrations, which 
had succeeded the Empire, was an agricultural world. Every 
farmer raised enough grain and enough sheep and enough 
cows for his own use. 

The medieval knight was a country squire and was rarely 



THE MEDIEVAL CITY 


171 


forced to pay for materials in money. His estates produced 
everything that he and his family ate and drank and wore on 
their backs. The bricks for his house were made along the 
banks of the nearest river. Wood for the rafters of the hall 
was cut from the baronial forest. The few articles that had to 



THE CASTLE AND THE CITY 


come from abroad were paid for in goods—in honey, in eggs, 
in fagots. 

But the Crusades upset the routine of that old agricultural 
life in a very drastic fashion. Suppose that the Duke of Hil- 
desheim was going to the Holy Land. He must travel thou¬ 
sands of miles, and he must pay his passage and his hotel hills. 

















172 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


At home he could pay with products of his farm. But he 
could not well take a hundred dozen eggs and a cartload of 
hams with him to satisfy the greed of the shipping agent of 
Venice or the innkeeper of the Brenner Pass. These gentle¬ 
men insisted upon cash. His lordship therefore was obliged 
to take a small quantity of gold with him upon his voyage. 
Where could he find this gold? He could borrow it from the 
Lombards, the descendants of the old Longobards, who had 
turned professional money-lenders and, seated behind their 
exchange-table (commonly known as “banco” or bank), were 
glad to let his Lordship have a few hundred gold pieces in ex¬ 
change for a mortgage upon his estates, that they might be re¬ 
paid in case his Lordship should die at the hands of the Turks. 

That was dangerous business for the borrower. In the end, 
the Lombards often owned the estates and the knight be¬ 
came a bankrupt, who hired himself out as a fighting man to 
a more powerful and more careful neighbor. 

H is Grace could also go to that part of the town where the 
Jews were forced to live. There he could borrow money at a 
rate of fifty or sixty per cent interest. That, too, was bad 
business. But was there a way out? Some of the people of the 
little city which surrounded the castle were said to have money. 
They had known the young lord all his life. His father and 
their fathers had been good friends. They would not be un¬ 
reasonable in their demands. Very well. His Lordship’s 
clerk, a monk who could write and keep accounts, sent a note 
to the best known merchants and asked for a small loan. The 
townspeople met in the workroom of the jeweller who made 
chalices for the near-by churches and discussed this demand. 
They could not well refuse. It would serve no purpose to 
ask for “interest.” In the first place, it was against the re¬ 
ligious principles of most people to take interest and in the 
second place, it would never be paid except in agricultural 
products and of these the people had enough and to spare. 

“But,” suggested the tailor who spent his days quietly sit¬ 
ting upon his table and who was somewhat of a philosopher, 
suppose that we ask some favor in return for our monev. 



THE MEDIEVAL TOWN 














174 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


We are all fond of fishing. But his Lordship won’t let us 
fish in his brook. Suppose that we let him have a hundred 
ducats and that he give us in return a written guarantee al¬ 
lowing us to fish all we want in all of his rivers. Then he gets 
the hundred which he needs, hut we get the fish and it will be 
good business all around.” 

The day his Lordship accepted this proposition (it seemed 
such an easy way of getting a hundred gold pieces) he signed 
the death-warrant of his own power. Ilis clerk drew up the 
agreement. His Lordship made his mark (for he could not 
sign his name) and departed for the East. Two years later 
he came back, dead broke. The townspeople were fishing in 
the castle pond. The sight of the silent row of anglers annoyed 
his Lordship. He told his equerry to go and chase the crowd 
away. They went, but that night a delegation of merchants 
visited the castle. They were very polite. They congratu¬ 
lated his Lordship upon his safe return. They were sorry his 
Lordship had been annoyed by the fishermen, hut as his Lord- 
ship might perhaps remember he had himself given them per¬ 
mission to fish, and the tailor produced the charter which had 
been kept in the safe of the jeweller ever since the master had 
gone to the Holy Land. 

H is Lordship was much annoyed. But once more he was 

in dire need of some money. In Italy he had signed his name 

to certain documents which were now in the possession of Sil- 

vestro dei Medici, the well-known banker. These documents 

were “promissory notes,” and they were due two months from 

date. Their total amount came to three hundred and forty 

• 

pounds, Flemish gold. Under these circumstances, the noble 
knight could not well show the rage which filled his heart and 
his proud soul. Instead, he suggested another little loan. The 
merchants retired to discuss the matter. 

After three days they came back and said “yes.” They 
were only too happy to he able to help their master in his diffi¬ 
culties, but in return for the 310 golden pounds would he give 
them another written promise (another charter) that they, 
the townspeople, might establish a council of their own to be 


THE MEDIEVAL CITY 


175 


elected by all the merchants and free citizens of the city, said 
council to manage civic affairs without interference from the 
castle? 

His Lordship was confoundedly angry. But again, he 
needed the money. He said yes, and signed the charter. Next 
week, he repented. Pie called his soldiers and went to the 
house of the jeweller and asked for the documents which his 
crafty subject had cajoled out of him under the pressure of 
circumstances. He took them away and burned them. The 
townspeople stood by and said nothing. But when next his 
Lordship needed money to pay for the dowry of his daughter, 
he was unable to get a single 
penny. After that little affair 
at the jeweller’s his credit was 
not considered good. He was 
forced to eat humble pie and 
offer to make certain repara¬ 
tions. Before his Lordship got 
the first installment of the stip¬ 
ulated sum, the townspeople 
were once more in possession of 
all their old charters and a 
brand new one which permitted 
them to build a “city hall” and 

4L/ 

a strong tower where all the 
charters might be kept pro¬ 
tected against fire and theft, 
which really meant protected 
against future violence on the 
part of the lord and his armed 
followers. 

This, in a very general way, is what happened during the 
centuries which followed the Crusades. It was a slow process, 
this gradual shifting of power from the castle to the city. There 
was some fighting. A few tailors and jewellers were killed and 
a few castles went up in smoke. But such occurrences were 
not common. Almost imperceptibly the towns grew richer 



















176 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


and the feudal lords grew poorer. To maintain themselves 
they were forever forced to exchange charters of civic liberty 
in return for ready cash. The cities grew. They offered an 
asylum to runaway serfs, who gained their liberty after they 
had lived a number of years behind the city walls. They came 
to be the home of the more energetic elements of the surround¬ 
ing country districts. They were proud of their new impor¬ 
tance and expressed their power in the churches and public 

buildings which they erect¬ 
ed around the old market 
place, where centuries be¬ 
fore the barter of eggs and 
sheep and honey and salt 
had taken place. They 
wanted their children to 
have a better chance in life 
than they had enjoyed 
themselves. They hired 
monks to come to their city 
and he school teachers. 
When they heard of a man 
who could paint pictures 
upon boards, they offered 
him a pension if he would 
come and cover the walls 



GUNPOWDER 


of their chapels and their town hall with scenes from the Holy 
Scriptures. 

Meanwhile his Lordship, in the dreary and drafty halls of 
his castle, saw all this upstart splendor and regretted the 
day when first he had signed away a single one of his sovereign 
rights and prerogatives. But he was helpless. The towns¬ 
people with their well-filled strong boxes snapped their fingers 
at him. They were free men, fully prepared to hold what they 
had gained by the sweat of their brows and after a struggle 
which had lasted for more than ten generations. 






MEDIEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 


As long as people were “nomads,” wandering tribes of shep¬ 
herds, all men had been equal and had been responsible for the 
welfare and safetv of the entire community. 

But after they had settled down and some had become rich 
and others had grown poor, the government was apt to fall into 
the hands of those who were not obliged to work for their living 
and who could devote themselves to politics. 

I have told you how this had happened in Egypt and in 
Mesopotamia and in Greece and in Rome. It occurred among 
the Germanic population of western Europe as soon as order 
had been restored. The western European world was ruled 
in the first place by an emperor who was elected by the seven 
or eight most important kings of the vast Roman Empire of 
the German nation and who enjoyed a great deal of imagin¬ 
ary and very little actual power. It was ruled by a number 
of kings who sat upon shaky thrones. The everyday govern¬ 
ment was in the hands of thousands of feudal princelets. Their 
subjects were peasants or serfs. There were few cities. There 
was hardly anv middle class. But during the thirteenth cen- 
tury (after an absence of almost a thousand years) the middle 
class—the merchant class—once more appeared upon the his¬ 
torical stage and its rise in power, as we saw in the last chapter, 
had meant a decrease in the influence of the castle folk. 

Thus far, the king, in ruling his domains, had only paid 
attention to the wishes of his noblemen and his bishops. But 
the new world of trade and commerce which grew out of the 

177 













THE SPREADING OF THE IDEA OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY 




































MEDIEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 


179 


Crusades forced him to recognize the middle class or suffer 
from an ever-increasing emptiness of his exchequer. Their 
majesties (if they had followed their hidden wishes) would 
have as lief consulted their cows and their pigs as the good 
burghers of their cities. But they could not help themselves. 
They swallowed the bitter pill because it was gilded, but not 
without a struggle. 

In England, during the absence of Richard the Lion 
Hearted (wh® had gone to the Holy Land, but who was spend¬ 
ing the greater part of his crusading voyage in an Austrian 
j ail), the government of the country had been placed in the 
hands of John, a brother of Richard, who was his inferior in 
the art of war, but his equal as a bad administrator. John had 
begun his career as a regent by losing Normandy and the 
greater part of the French possessions. Next, he had man¬ 
aged to get into a quarrel with Pope Innocent III, the famous 
enemy of the Hohenstaufens. The pope had excommunicated 
John (as Gregory VII had excommunicated the Emperor 
Henry IV two centuries before). In the year 1213 John had 
been obliged to make an ignominious peace, just as Henry IV 
had been obliged to do in the year 1077. 

Undismayed by his lack of success, John continued to abuse 
his royal power until his disgruntled vassals made a prisoner 
of their anointed ruler and forced him to promise that he 
would be good and would never again interfere with the ancient 
rights of his subjects. All this happened on a little island in 
the Thames, near the village of Runnymede, on the 15th of 
June of the year 1215. The document to which John signed 
his name was called the Big Charter—the Magna Carta. It 
contained very little that was new. It restated in short and 
direct sentences the ancient duties of the king and enumerated 
the privileges of his vassals. It paid little attention to the 
rights (if any) of the vast majority of the people, the peasants, 
but it offered certain securities to the rising class of the mer¬ 
chants. It was a charter of great importance because it defined 
the powers of the king with more precision than had ever been 
done before. But it was still a purely medieval document. It 



180 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


did not refer to common human beings, unless they happened 
to be the property of the vassal, which must be safeguarded 
against royal tyranny just as the baronial woods and cows 
were protected against an excess of zeal on the part of the 
royal foresters. 

A few years later, however, we begin to hear a very different 
note in the councils of His Majesty. 

John, who was bad, both by birth and inclination, solemnly 
had promised to obey the Great Charter and then had broken 
every one of its many stipulations. Fortunately, he soon died 
and was succeeded by his son Henry III, who was forced to 
recognize the charter anew. Meanwhile, Uncle Richard, the 
Crusader, had cost the country a great deal of money and the 
king was obliged to ask for a few loans that he might pay his 
obligations to the Jewish money-lenders. The large landown¬ 
ers and the bishops who acted as councillors to the king could 
not provide him with the necessary gold and silver. The king 
then gave orders that a few representatives of the cities be 
called upon to attend the sessions of his Great Council. They 
made their first appearance in the year 126.5. They were ex¬ 
pected to act only as financial experts and not to take part in 
the general discussion of matters of state. 

Gradually, however, these representatives of the “com¬ 
mons” were consulted upon many problems and the meet¬ 
ing of noblemen, bishops, and city delegates developed into a 
regular parliament, a place “ou l’on parlait,” which means in 
English where people talked, before important affairs of state 
were decided upon. 

But the institution of such a general advisory board with 
certain executive powers was not an English invention, as 
seems to be the general belief, and government by a “king and 
his parliament” was by no means restricted to the British Isles. 
You will find it in every part of Europe. In some countries, 
like France, the rapid increase of the Royal power after the 
middle ages reduced the influence of the “parliament” to noth¬ 
ing. In the year 1302 representatives of the cities had been 
admitted to the meeting of the French Parliament, but five 


MEDIEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 


181 


centuries had to pass before this “Parliament” was strong 1 
enough to assert the rights of the middle class, the so-called 
Third Estate, and break the power of the king. Then they 
made up for lost time and during the French Revolution abol¬ 
ished the king, the clergy, and the nobles and made repre- 



THE HOME OF SWISS LIBERTY 


sentatives of the common people the rulers of the land. In 
Spain, the ”cortes” (the king’s council) had been opened to the 
commoners as early as the first half of the twelfth century. 
In the German Empire, a number of important cities had ob¬ 
tained the rank of “imperial cities” whose representatives must 
be heard in the imperial diet. 

In the Scandinavian country, the story of representative 
government is particularly interesting. In Sweden, representa¬ 
tives of the people attended the sessions of the Rigsdag at the 
first meeting of the year 1359. In Denmark, the Daneholf, the 
ancient national assembly, was reestablished in 1314, and, al¬ 
though the nobles often regained control of the country at the 
expense of the king and the people, the representatives of the 
cities were never completely deprived of their power. In 
















182 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Iceland, the Althing, the assembly of all free landowners, 
who managed the affairs of the island, began to hold regular 
meetings in the ninth century and continued to do so for more 
than a thousand years. 



THE ABJURATION OF PHILIP II 


In Switzerland, the freemen of the different cantons de¬ 
fended their assemblies against the attempts of a number of 
feudal neighbors with great success. 

Finally, in the Low Countries (in Holland), the councils of 
the different duchies and counties were attended by represen¬ 
tatives of the third estate as early as the thirteenth century. 

In the sixteenth century a number of these small provinces 
rebelled against their king, abjured his majesty in a solemn 
meeting of the “Estates General,” removed the clergy from 
the discussions, broke the power of the nobles, and assumed full 
executive authority over the newly-established Republic of The 
United Seven Netherlands. For two centuries, the representa¬ 
tives of the town-councils ruled the country without a king, 
without bishops, and without noblemen. The city had become 
supreme, and the good burghers had become the rulers of the 
land. 






































THE MEDIEVAL WORLD 


Dates are a very useful invention. We eould not do with¬ 
out them, but unless we are very careful they will play tricks 
with us. They are apt to make history too precise. For ex¬ 
ample, when I talk of the point of view of medieval man, I 
do not mean that on the 31st of December of the year 476, 
suddenly all the people of Europe said, “Ah, now the Roman 
Empire has come to an end and we are living in the middle 
ages. How interesting!” 

You could have found men at the Frankish court of Charle¬ 
magne who were Romans in their habits, in their manners, in 
their outlook upon life. On the other hand, when you grow 
up you will discover that some of the people in this world have 
never passed beyond the stage of the cave man. All times 
and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding generations 
play tag with each other. But it is possible to study the minds 
of a good many true representatives of the middle ages and 
then give you an idea of the average man’s attitude toward 
life and the many difficult problems of living. 

First of all, remember that the people of the middle ages 
never thought of themselves as free-born citizens, who could 
come and go at will and shape their fate according to their 
ability or energy or luck. On the contrary, they all considered 
themselves part of the general scheme of things, which included 
emperors and serfs, popes and heretics, heroes and swashbuck¬ 
lers, rich men, poor men, beggar men, and thieves. They ac¬ 
cepted this divine ordinance and asked no questions. In this, 


183 







184 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of course, they differed radically from modern people, who ac¬ 
cept nothing and who are forever trying to improve their own 
financial and political situation. 

To the man and woman of the thirteenth century, the world 
hereafter—a Heaven of wonderful delights and a Hell of brim¬ 
stone and suffering—meant something more than empty words 
or vague theological phrases. It was an actual fact and the 
medieval burghers and knights spent the greater part of their 
time preparing for it. We modern people regard a noble 
death after a well-spent life with the quiet calm of the ancient 

Greeks and Romans. After three score vears of work and ef- 

•/ 

fort, we go to sleep with the feeling that all will be well. 

But during the middle ages, the King of Terrors with 
his grinning skull and his rattling bones was man’s steady com¬ 
panion. He woke his victims up with terrible tunes on his 
scratchy fiddle—he sat down with them at dinner—he smiled 
at them from behind trees and shrubs when they took a girl 
out for a walk. If you had heard nothing but hair-raising 
yarns about cemeteries and coffins and fearful diseases when 
you were very young, instead of listening to the fairy stories 
of Andersen and Grimm, you, too, would have lived all your 
days in a dread of the final hour and the gruesome Day of 
Judgment. That is exactly what happened to the children of 
the middle ages. They moved in a world of devils and spooks 
and only a few occasional angels. Sometimes their fear of 
the future filled their souls with humility and piety, but often 
it influenced them the other way and made them cruel and 
sentimental. They would first of all murder all the women 
and children of a captured city, and then they would devoutly 
march to a holy spot and, with their hands gory with the blood 
of innocent victims, they would pray that a merciful Heaven 
forgive them their sins. Yea, they would do more than pray, 
they would weep bitter tears and would confess themselves the 
most wicked of sinners. But the next day, they would once 
more butcher a camp of Saracen enemies without a spark of 
mercy in their hearts. 

Of course, the Crusaders were knights and obeyed a some- 




THE MEDIEVAL WORLD 


185 


what different eode of manners from the common men. But in 
such respects the common man was just the same as his mas¬ 
ter. He, too, resembled a shy horse, easily frightened by a 
shadow or a silly piece of paper, capable of excellent and faith¬ 
ful service but liable to run away and do terrible damage when 
his feverish imagination saw a ghost. 

In judging these people, however, it is wise to remember 
the terrible disadvantages under which they lived. They were 
really barbarians who posed as civilized people. Charlemagne 
and Otto the Great were called “Roman emperors,” but they 
had as little resemblance to a real Roman emperor (say Augus¬ 
tus or Marcus Aurelius) as “King” Wumba Wumbar of the 
upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of Sweden 
or Denmark. They were savages who lived amidst glorious 
ruins, but who did not share the benefits of the civilization 
which their fathers and grandfathers had destroyed. They 
knew nothing. They were ignorant of almost every fact which 
a boy of twelve knows to-day. They were obliged to go to 
one single book for all their information. That was the Bible. 
But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the history 
of the human race for the better are those chapters of the 
New Testament which teach us the great moral lessons of 
love, charity, and forgiveness. As a handbook of astronomy, 
zoology, botany, geometry, and all the other sciences, the ven¬ 
erable book is not especially useful. In the twelfth century, a 
second book was added to the medieval library, the great en¬ 
cyclopedia of useful knowledge compiled by Aristotle, the 
Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ. Why 
the Christian Church should have been willing to accord such 
high honors to the teacher of Alexander the Great, whereas 
they condemned all other Greek philosophers on account of 
their heathenish doctrines, I really do not know. But next to 
the Bible, Aristotle was recognized as the only reliable teacher 
whose works could be safely placed into the hands of true 
Christians. 

His works had reached Europe in a somewhat roundabout 
way. They had gone from Greece to Alexandria. They had 


186 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


then been translated from the Greek into the Arabic language 

by the Mohammedans, who conquered Egypt in the seventh 

century. They followed the Moslem armies into Spain and 

were taught in the Moorish universities of Cordova. The 

Arabic text was then translated into Latin bv the Christian 

%/ 

students who had crossed the Pyrenees to get a liberal educa¬ 
tion and this much-traveled version of the famous books was 
at last taught at the different schools of northwestern Europe. 
It was not very clear, but that made it all the more interesting. 

With the help of the Bible and Aristotle, the most brilliant 
men of the middle ages now set to work to explain all things 
between Heaven and Earth in their relation to the expressed 
will of God. These brilliant men, the so-called Scholastics or 
Schoolmen, were really very intelligent, but they had obtained 
their information exclusively from books and never from ac¬ 
tual observation. If they wanted to lecture on the sturgeon 
or on caterpillars, they read the Old and New Testaments and 
Aristotle, and told their students everything these good books 
had to say upon the subject of caterpillars and sturgeons. 
They did not go out to the nearest river to catch a sturgeon. 
They did not leave their libraries and repair to the backyard 
to catch a few caterpillars and look at these animals and study 
them in their native haunts. Even famous scholars did not 
inquire whether the sturgeons in the land of Palestine and the 
caterpillars of Macedonia might not have been different from 
the sturgeons and the caterpillars of western Europe. 

When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like 
Roger Bacon appeared in the council of the learned and began 
to experiment with magnifying glasses and funny little tele¬ 
scopes and actually dragged the sturgeon and the caterpillar 
into the lecturing room and proved that they were different 
from the creatures described by the Old Testament and by 
Aristotle, the Schoolmen shook their dignified heads. Bacon 
was going too far. When he dared to suggest that an hour 
of actual observation was worth more than ten vears with 
Aristotle and that the works of that famous Greek might as 
well have remained untranslated for all the good they had ever 



THE MEDIEVAL WORLD 






























































188 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


done, the Scholastics went to the police and said, ‘ This man is 
a danger to the safety of the state. He wants us to study 
Greek that we may read Aristotle in the original. Why should 
he not be contented with our Latin-Arabic translation which 
has satisfied our faithful people for so many hundred years? 
Why is he so curious about the insides of fishes and the insides 
of insects? He is probably a wicked magician trying to upset 
the established order of things by his Black Magic.” And so 
well did they plead their cause that the frightened guardians 
of the peace forbade Bacon to write a single word for more 
than ten years. When he resumed his studies he had learned 
a lesson. He wrote his books in a queer cipher which made it 
impossible for his contemporaries to read them, a trick which 
became common as the Church became more desperate in its 
attempts to prevent people from asking questions which would 
lead to doubts and infidelity. 

This, however, was not done out of any wicked desire to 
eep people ignorant. The feeling which prompted the heretic 
1 inters of that day was really a very kindly one. They firmly 
b lieved—nay, they knew—that this life was but the prepara- 
ti n for our real existence in the next world. They felt con¬ 
vinced that too much knowledge made people uncomfortable, 
filled their minds with dangerous opinions, and led to doubt 
and hence to perdition. A medieval Schoolman who saw one 
of his pupils stray away from the revealed authority of the 
Bible and Aristotle, that he might study things for himself, felt 
as uncomfortable as a loving mother who sees her young child 
approach a hot stove. She knows that he will burn his little 
fingers if he is allowed to touch it and she tries to keep him 
back; if necessary she will use force. But she really loves 
the child, and if he will only obey her, she will be as good to him 
as she possibly can be. In the same way the medieval guard¬ 
ians of people’s souls, while they were strict in all matters 
pertaining to the Faith, slaved day and night to render the 
greatest possible service to the members of their flock. They 
held out a helping hand whenever they could, and the society 
of that day shows the influence of thousands of good men and 



THE MEDIEVAL WORLD 


189 


pious women who tried to make the fate of the average mortal 
as bearable as possible. 

A serf was a serf and his position would never change. But 
the good Lord of the middle ages who allowed the serf to 
remain a slave all his life had bestowed an immortal soul upon 
this humble creature, and therefore he must he protected in his 
rights that he might live and die as a good Christian. When 
he grew too old or too weak to work, he must he taken care 
of by the feudal master for whom he had worked. The serf, 
therefore, who led a monotonous and dreary life, was never 
haunted by fear of to-morrow. He knew that he was “safe”— 
that he could not he thrown out of employment, that he would 
always have a roof over his head (a leaky roof, perhaps, but 
a roof all the same), and that lie would always have something 
to eat. 

This feeling of “stability” and of “safety” was found in all 
classes of society. In the towns the merchants and the artisans 
established guilds which assured every member of a steady in¬ 
come. It did not encourage the ambitious to do better than 
their neighbors. Too often the guilds gave protection to the 
“slacker” who managed to “get by.” But they established 
among the laboring classes a general feeling of content and 
assurance which no longer exists in our day of general com¬ 
petition. The middle ages were familiar with the dangers 
of what we modern people call “corners,” when a single rich 
man gets hold of all the available grain or soap or pickled her¬ 
ring, and then forces the world to buy from him at his own 
price. The authorities, therefore, discouraged wholesale trad¬ 
ing and regulated the price at which merchants were allowed 
to sell their goods. 

The middle ages disliked competition. Why compete and 
fill the world with hurry and rivalry and a multitude of push¬ 
ing men, when the Day of Judgment was near at hand, when 
riches would count for nothing and when the good serf would 
enter the golden gates of Heaven while the bad knight would be 
sent to do penance in the deepest pit of Inferno? 

In short, the people of the middle ages were asked to sur- 



190 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


render part of their liberty of thought and action, that they 
might enjoy greater safety from poverty of the body and pov¬ 
erty of the soul. 

And with a very few exceptions, they did not object. They 
firmly believed that they were mere visitors upon this planet— 
that they were here to be prepared for a greater and more im¬ 
portant life. Deliberately they turned their backs upon a 
world which was filled with suffering and wickedness and in¬ 
justice. They pulled down the blinds, that the rays of the 
sun might not distract their attention from that chapter in the 
Apocalypse which told them of that heavenly light which was 
to illumine their happiness in all eternity. They tried to close 
their eyes to most of the joys of the world in which they lived 
that they might enjoy those which awaited them in the near 
future. They accepted life as a necessary evil and welcomed 
death as the beginning of a glorious day. 

The Greeks and the Romans had never bothered about the 
future but had tried to establish their Paradise right here upon 
this earth. They had succeeded in making life extremely pleas¬ 
ant for those of their fellow men who did not happen to be 
slaves. Then came the other extreme of the middle ages, 
when man built himself a Paradise beyond the highest clouds 
and turned this world into a vale of tears for high and low, 
for rich and poor, for the intelligent and the dumb. It was 
time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction, as 
I shall tell you in my next chapter. 


\ 


f 



MEDIEVAL TRADE 


There were three good reasons why the Italian cities should 
have been the first to regain a position of great importance 
during the late middle ages. The Italian peninsula had been 
settled by Rome at a very early date. There had been more 
roads and more towns and more schools than anywhere else 
in Europe. 

The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere, 
but there had been so much to destroy that more had been able 
to survive. In the second place, the pope lived in Italy and, 
as the head of a vast political machine, which owned land and 
serfs and buildings and forests and rivers and conducted courts 
of law, he was in constant receipt of a great deal of money. 
The papal authorities had to be paid in gold and silver as did 
the merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The 
cows and the eggs and the horses and all the other agricultural 
products of the north and the west must be changed into actual 
cash before the debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome. 
This made Italy the one country where there was a compara¬ 
tive abundance of gold and silver. Finally, during the Cru¬ 
sades the Italian cities had become the point of embarkation 
for the Crusaders and had profiteered to an almost unbeliev¬ 
able extent. 

And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same 
Italian cities remained the distributing centers for those Orien¬ 
tal goods upon which the people of Europe had come to de¬ 
pend during the time they had spent in the Near East. 


191 








MEDIEVAL TRADE 
























MEDIEVAL TRADE 


193 


Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice. Veniee was 
a republic built upon a mud bank. Thither people from the 
mainland had fled during the invasion of the barbarians in the 
fourth century. Surrounded on all sides by the sea, they had 
engaged in the business of salt-making. Salt had been very 
scarce during the middle ages, and the price had been high. 
For hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of 
this indispensable table commodity (I say indispensable, be¬ 
cause people, like sheep, fall ill unless thej r get a certain amount 
of salt in their food). The people had used this monopoly to 
increase the power of their city. At times they had even dared 
to defy the power of the popes. They had grown rich and 
had begun to build ships, which engaged in trade with the 
Orient. During the Crusades, these ships were used to carry 
passengers to the Holy Land, and when the passengers could 
not pay for their tickets in cash, they were obliged to help fight 
for the Venetians, who were forever increasing their colonies in 
the iEgean Sea, in Asia Minor, and in Egypt. 

By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had 
grown to two hundred thousand, which made Venice the big¬ 
gest city of the middle ages. The people were without in¬ 
fluence upon the government, which was the private affair of a 
small number of rich merchant families. They elected a senate 
and a Doge (or Duke), hut the actual rulers of the city were 
the members of the famous Council of Ten, who maintained 
themselves with the help of a highly organized system of secret- 
service men and professional murderers, and who kept watch 
upon all citizens and quietly removed those who might he dan¬ 
gerous to the safety of their high-handed and unscrupulous 
Committee of Public Safety. 

The other extreme of government, a democracy of very 
turbulent habits, was to be found in Florence. This city con¬ 
trolled the main road from northern Europe to Rome and used 
the money which it had derived from this fortunate position 
to engage in manufacturing. The Florentines tried to follow 
the example of Athens. Noblemen, priests, and members of 
the guilds all took part in the discussions of civic affairs. This 


194 THE STORY OF MANKIND 

led to great civic upheaval. People were forever being di¬ 
vided into political parties and these parties fought each other 
with intense bitterness and exiled their enemies and confiscated 
their possessions as soon as they had gained a victory in the 
council. After several centuries of this rule by organized mobs, 
the inevitable happened. A powerful family made itself master 
of the city and governed the town and the surrounding country 
after the fashion of the old Greek “tyrants.” They were called 
the Medici. The earliest Medici had been physicians (medicus 
is Latin for physician, hence their name), but later they had 
turned bankers. Their banks and their pawnshops were to be 
found in all the more important centers of trade. Even to¬ 
day our American pawnshops display the three golden balls 
which were part of the coat of arms of the mighty House of 
the Medici, who became rulers of Florence and married their 
daughters to the kings of France and were buried in graves 
worthy of a Roman Caesar. 

Then there was Genoa, the great rival of Venice, where 
the merchants specialized in trade with Tunis in Africa and 
the grain depots of the Black Sea. Then there were more than 
two hundred other cities, some large and some small, each a 
perfect commercial unit, all of them fighting their neighbors 
and rivals with the undying hatred of neighbors who are de¬ 
priving each other of their profits. 

Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been 
brought to these distributing centers, they must be prepared 
for the voyage to the west and the north. 

Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseilles, from where 
they were reshipped to the cities along the Rhone, which in 
turn served as the market places of northern and western 
France. Venice used the land route to northern Europe. 

The little cities on the coast of northwestern Europe had 
an interesting story of their own. The medieval world ate a 
great deal of fish. There were many fast days and then people 
were not permitted to eat meat. For those who lived away 
from the coast and from the rivers, this meant a diet of eggs 
or nothing at all. But early in the thirteenth century a Dutch 


MEDIEVAL TRADE 


195 


fisherman had discovered a way of curing herring, so that it 
could be transported to distant points. The herring fisheries 
of the North Sea then became of great importance. But some 
time during the thirteenth century, this useful little fish (for 
reasons of its own) moved from the North Sea to the Baltic and 
the cities of that inland sea began to make money. All the 
world now sailed to the Baltic to catch herring and as that fish 
could only he caught during a few months each year (the rest 
of the .time it spends in deep water, raising large families of 
little herrings), the ships would have been idle during the rest 
of the time unless they had found another occupation. They 
were then used to carry the wheat of northern and central Rus- 
sia to southern and western Europe. On the return voyage 
they brought spices and silks and carpets and Oriental rugs 
from Venice and Genoa to Bruges and Hamburg and Bremen. 

Out of such simple beginnings there developed an impor¬ 
tant system of international trade which reached from the 
manufacturing cities of Bruges and Ghent (where the almighty 
guilds fought pitched battles with the kings of France and 
England and established a labor tyranny which completely 
ruined both the employers and the workmen) to the Republic 
of Novgorod in northern Russia. This was a mighty city until 



vmijXuuiijL 


GREAT NOVGOROD 













] 96 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Tsar Ivan, who distrusted all merchants, took the town and 
killed sixty thousand people in less than a month’s time and re¬ 
duced the survivors to beggary. 

That they might protect themselves against pirates and 
excessive tolls and annoying legislation, the merchants of the 
north founded a protective league which was called the 
“Hansa.” The IIansa, which had its headquarters in Liibeck, 
was a voluntary association of more than one hundred cities. 


The association maintained a navy of its own, which patrolled 
the seas and fought and defeated the kings of England and 
Denmark when they dared to interfere with the rights and the 
privileges of the mighty Hanseatic merchants. 

I wish that I had more space to tell you some of the won- 



THE HANSA SHIP 


















































MEDIEVAL TRADE 


197 


derful stories of this strange commerce which was carried on 
over the high mountains and across the deep seas amidst such 
dangers that every voyage became a glorious adventure. But 
it would take several volumes and it cannot be done here. 
Besides, 1 hope that I have told you enough about the middle 
ages to make you curious to read more in the excellent books 
of which I shall give you a list at the end of this volume. 

The middle ages, as I have tried to show you, had been a 
period of very slow progress. The people who were in power 
believed that “progress” was a very undesirable invention of 
the Evil One and ought to be discouraged, and as they hap¬ 
pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it was easy to enforce 
their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate knights. 
Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into 
the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and were 
considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a jail 
sentence of twenty years. 

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the flood of inter¬ 
national commerce swept over western Europe as the Nile 
had swept across the valley of ancient Egypt. It left behind 
a fertile sediment of prosperity. Prosperity meant leisure 
hours, and these leisure hours gave both men and women a 
chance to buy manuscripts and take an interest in literature 
and art and music. 

Then once more was the world filled with that divine curi¬ 
osity which has elevated man from the ranks of those other 
mammals who are his distant cousins but who have remained 
dumb, and the cities, of whose growth and development I have 
told you in my last chapter, offered a safe shelter to these 
brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow domain 
of the established order of things. 

They set to work. They opened the windows of their 
cloistered and studious cells. A flood of sunlight entered the 
dusty rooms and showed them the cobwebs which had gathered 
during the long period of semi-darkness. 

They began to clean house. Next they cleaned their gar¬ 
dens. 


198 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Then they went out into the open fields, outside the crum¬ 
bling town walls, and said, “This is a good world. We are 
glad that we live in it.” 

At that moment, the middle ages came to an end and a new 
world began. 




THE RENAISSANCE 


The Renaissance was not a political or religious move¬ 
ment. It was a state of mind. 

The men of the Renaissance continued to be the obedient 
sons of the Mother Church. They were subjects of kings and 
emperors and dukes and murmured not. 

But their outlook upon life was changed. They began to 
wear different clothes—to speak a different language—to live 
different lives in different houses. 

They no longer concentrated all their thoughts and their 
efforts upon the blessed existence that awaited them in Heaven. 
They tried to establish their Paradise upon this planet, and, 
truth to tell, they succeeded in a remarkable degree. 

I have quite often warned you against the danger that 
lies in historical dates. People take them too literally. They 
think of the middle ages as a period of darkness and igno¬ 
rance. “Click,” says the clock, and the Renaissance begins, and 
cities and palaces are flooded with the bright sunlight of an 
eager intellectual curiosity. 

As a matter of fact, it is quite impossible to draw such 
sharp lines. The thirteenth century belonged most decidedly 
to the middle ages. All historians agree upon that. But was 
it a time of darkness and stagnation merely? By no means. 
People were tremendously alive. Great states were being 
founded. Large centers of commerce were being developed. 
High above the turretted towers of the castle and the peaked 
roof of the town hall rose the slender spire of the newly built 
Gothic cathedral. Everywhere the world was in motion. The 
high and mighty gentlemen of the city hall, who had just be- 


199 











200 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 

come conscious of their own strength (hy way of their recently 
acquired riches), were struggling for more power with their 
feudal masters. The members of the guilds, who had just be¬ 
come aware of the important fact that “numbers count,’’ were 
fighting the high and mighty gentlemen of the city hall. 

To enliven the scenery during the long hours of evening 
when the badly lighted streets did not invite further political 
and economic dispute, the Troubadours told their stories and 
sang their songs of romance and adventure and heroism and 
loyalty to all fair women. Meanwhile youth, impatient of the 
slowness of progress, flocked to the universities, and thereby 
hangs a story. 

The middle ages were “internationally minded.” That 
sounds difficult, but wait until I explain it to you. We modern 
people are “nationally minded.” We are Americans or Eng¬ 
lishmen or Frenchmen or Italians and speak English or French 
or Italian and go to English and French and Italian univer¬ 
sities, unless we want to specialize in some particular branch 
of learning which is only taught elsewhere, and then we learn 
another language and go to Munich or Madrid or Moscow. 
But the people of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rarely 
talked of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians. 
They said, “I am a citizen of Sheffield or Bordeaux or Genoa.” 
Because thev all belonged to one and the same church thev felt 
a certain bond of brotherhood. And as all educated men could 
speak Latin, they possessed an international language which 
removed the stupid language barriers that have grown up 
in modern Europe and that place the small nations at such 
an enormous disadvantage. Just as an example, take the case 
of Erasmus, the great preacher of tolerance and laughter, who 
wrote his books in the sixteenth centurv. He was a native 
of a small Dutch village. He wrote in Latin and all the world 
was his audience. If he were alive to-day, he woidd write in 
Dutch. Then only five or six million people would be able to 
read him. To be understood by the rest of Europe and Amer¬ 
ica, his publishers would he obliged to translate his books into 
twenty different languages. That would cost a lot of money 


THE RENAISSANCE 


201 


and most likely the publishers would never take the trouble 
or the risk. 

Six hundred years ago that could not be done. The greater 
part of the people were still very ignorant and could not read 
or write at all. But those who had mastered the difficult art 
of handling the goose quill belonged to an international repub¬ 
lic of letters which spread across the entire continent and which 
knew of no boundaries and respected no limitations of lan¬ 
guage or nationality. The universities were the strongholds of 
this republic. Unlike modern fortifications, they did not fol¬ 
low the frontier. They were to be found wherever a teacher 
and a few pupils happened to find themselves together. There 
again the middle ages and the Renaissance differed from our 
own time. Nowadays, when a new university is built, the 
process (almost invariably) is as follows: Some rich man 
wants to do something for the community in which he lives, or 
a particular religious sect wants to build a school to keep its 
faithful children under decent supervision, or a state needs doc¬ 
tors and lawyers and teachers. The university begins as a 
large sum of money which 
is deposited in a bank. 

This money is then used 
to construct buildings 
and laboratories and dor¬ 
mitories. Finally pro¬ 
fessional teachers are 
hired, entrance examina¬ 
tions are held, and the 
university is on the way. 

But in the middle 
ages things were done 
differently. A wise man 
said to himself, “I have 
discovered a great truth. 

I must impart my knowl¬ 
edge to others.” And he 
began to preach his wis- 



THE MEDIEVAL LABORATORY 
















202 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


dom wherever and whenever he could get a few people to listen 
to him, like a modern soap-box orator. If he was dull, they 
shrugged their shoulders and continued their way. If he was 
an interesting speaker, the crowd came and stayed. Ev and 
by certain young men began to come regularly to hear 
the words of wisdom of this great teacher. They brought copy¬ 
books with them and a little bottle of ink and a goose quill and 
wrote down what seemed to be important. One day it rained. 
The teacher and his pupils retired to an empty basement or 
the room of the “Professor.” The learned man sat in his chair 
and the boys sat on the floor. That was the beginning of the 
University, a corporation of professors and students during 
the middle ages, when the teacher counted for everything and 
the building in which he taught counted for very little. 

As an example, let me tell you of something that happened 
in the ninth century. In the town of Salerno, near Naples, there 
were a number of excellent physicians. They attracted people 
desirous of learning the medical profession and for almost a 
thousand years (until 1817) there was a University of Salerno 
which taught the wisdom of Hippocrates, the great Greek doc¬ 
tor who had practised his art in ancient Hellas in the fifth 
century before the birth of Christ. 

Then there was Abelard, the young priest from Brittany, 
who early in the twelfth century began to lecture on theology 
and logic in Paris. Thousands of eager young men flocked 
to the French city to hear him. Other priests who disagreed 
with him stepped forward to explain their point of view. Paris 
was soon filled with a clamoring multitude of Englishmen and 
Germans and Italians and students from Sweden and Hun¬ 
gary, and around the old cathedral which stood on a little 
island in the Seine there grew the famous University of Paris. 

In Bologna, in Italy, a monk by the name of Gratian had 
compiled a textbook for those whose business it was to know 
the laws of the church. Young priests and many laymen then 
came from all over Europe to hear Gratian explain his ideas. 
To protect themselves against the landlords and the inn¬ 
keepers and the hoarding-house ladies of the city, they 


THE RENAISSANCE 


203 


formed a corporation (or university), and behold the be¬ 
ginning of the University of Bologna. 

Next there was a quarrel in the University of Paris. We 
do not know what caused it, hut a number of disgruntled 
teachers together with their pupils crossed the channel and 
found a hospitable home in a 
little village on the Thames 
called Oxford, and in this way 
the famous University of Oxford 
came into being. ' In the same 
way, in the year 1222, there had 
been a split in the Universitv of 
B ologna. The discontented 
teachers (again followed by their 
pupils) had moved to Padua, 
and their proud city thencefor¬ 
ward boasted of a universitv of 
its own. And so it went from 
Valladolid in Spain to Cracow 
in distant Poland. 

It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these 
early professors would sound absurd to our ears, trained to 
listen to logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point, 
however, which I want to make is this—the middle ages and 
especially the thirteenth century were not a time when the 
world stood entirely still. Among the younger generation, 
there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was a restless 
if somewhat bashful asking of questions. And out of this 
turmoil grew the Renaissance. 

But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene 
of the medieval world, a solitary figure crossed the stage, of 
whom you ought to know more than his mere name. This 
man was called Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer 
who belonged to the Alighieri family and he saw the light of 
day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his ancestors 
while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis 
of Assisi upon the walls of the church of the Holy Cross, but 



THE RENAISSANCE 































204 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


often when he went to school his frightened eyes would see the 
puddles of hlood which told of the terrible and endless warfare 
that raged forever between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, 
the followers of the pope and the adherents of the emperors. 

When he grew up, he became a Guelph, because his father 
had been one before him, just as an American hoy might be¬ 
come a Democrat or a Republican, simply because his father 
had happened to he a Democrat or a Republican. But after a 
few years, Dante saw that Italy, unless united under a single 
head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered jeal¬ 
ousies of a thousand little cities. Then he became a Ghibelline. 

He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a 

mighty emperor might come 

and reestablish unity and or- 

•/ 

der. Alas! he hoped in vain. 
The Ghibellines were driven 
out of Florence in the year 
1302. From that time on until 
the day of his death amidst the 
dreary ruins of Ravenna, in the 
year 1321, Dante was a home¬ 
less wanderer, eating the bread 
of charity at the table of rich 
patrons whose names would 
have sunk into the deepest pit 
of oblivion but for this single 
fact, that they had been kind to 
a poet in his misery. During 
the many years of exile. Dante 
felt compelled to justify him¬ 
self and his actions when he 
had been a political leader in 
his home town, and when he had 
spent his days walking along 
the hanks of the Arno that he 
might catch a glimpse of the 
lovely Beatrice Portinari, who 



DANTE 

































THE RENAISSANCE 


205 


died the wife of another man, a dozen years before the Ghibel- 
line disaster. 

He had failed in the ambitions of his career. He had 
faithfully served the town of his birth, and before a corrupt 
court he had been accused of stealing the public funds and 
had been condemned to be burned alive should he venture 
back within the realm of the city of Florence. To clear him¬ 
self before his own conscience and before his contemporaries, 
Dante then created an Imaginary World, and with great 
detail he described the circumstances which had led to his 
defeat and depicted the hopeless condition of greed and hatred 
which had turned his fair and beloved Italy into a battlefield 
for the pitiless mercenaries of wicked and selfish tyrants. 

He tells us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year 
1300 he had lost his way in a dense forest and how he found 
his path barred by a leopard and a lion and a wolf. He gave 
himself up for lost, when a white figure appeared amidst the 
trees. It was Virgil, the Roman poet and philosopher, sent 
upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by Bea¬ 
trice, who from high Heaven watched over the fate of her 
true lover. Virgil then takes Dante through Purgatory and 
through Hell. Deeper and deeper the path leads them, until 
they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer himself stands frozen 
into the eternal ice surrounded by the most terrible of sinners, 
traitors and liars and those who have achieved fame and suc¬ 
cess by lies and by deceit. But before the two wanderers have 
reached this terrible spot, Dante has met all those who in 
some way or other have played a role in the history of his 
beloved city. Emperors and popes, dashing knights and whin¬ 
ing usurers, they are all there, doomed to eternal punishment 
or awaiting the day of deliverance when they shall leave Pur¬ 
gatory for Heaven. 

It is a curious story. It is a handbook of everything the 
people of the thirteenth century did and felt and feared and 
prayed for. Through it all moves the figure of the lonely 
Florentine exile, forever followed by the shadow of his own 
despair. 


206 


THE STORY OT MANKIND 


And behold! when the gates of death were closing upon 
the sad poet of the middle ages, the portals of life swung 
open to the child who was to be the first of the men of the 
Renaissance. That was Francesco Petrarca, the son of the 
notary public of the little town of Arezzo. 

Francesco’s father had belonged to the same political party 
as Dante. He too had been exiled and thus it happened that 
Petrarca (or Petrarch, as we call him) was born away from 
Florence. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Montpellier 
in France that he might become a lawyer like his father. But 
the boy did not want to be a jurist. He hated the law. He 
wanted to be a scholar and a poet—and because he wanted to 
be a scholar and a poet beyond everything else, he became one, 
as people of strong wills are apt to do. He made long voy¬ 
ages, copying manuscripts in Flanders and in the cloisters 
along the Rhine and in Paris and Liege and finally in Rome. 
Then he went to live in a lonely valley in the wild mountains, 
and there he studied and wrote, and soon he became so famous 
for his verse and for his learning that both the University of 
Paris and the king of Naj)les invited him to come and teach 
their students and subjects. On the way to his new job, he 
was obliged to pass through Rome. The people had heard of 
his fame as an editor of half-forgotten Roman authors. They 
decided to honor him, and in the ancient forum of the imperial 
city Petrarch was crowned with the laurel wreath of the poet. 

From that moment on, his life was an endless career of 
honor and appreciation. He wrote the things which people 
wanted most to hear. They were tired of theological dispu¬ 
tations. Poor Dante could wander through hell as much as 
he wanted. But Petrarch wrote of love and of nature and the 
sun and never mentioned those gloomy things which seemed 
to have been the stock in trade of the last generation. And 
when Petrarch came to a city, all the people flecked to meet 
him and he was received like a conquering hero. If he hap¬ 
pened to bring his young friend Boccaccio, the story teller, 
with him, so much the better. They were both men of their 
time, full of curiosity, willing to read everything once, digging 


THE RENAISSANCE 


207 


in forgotten and musty libraries that they might find still an¬ 
other manuscript of Virgil or Ovid or any of the other old 
Latin poets. They were good. Christians. Of course they 
were! Everyone was. But no need of going around with a 
long face and wearing a dirty coat just because some day or 
other you were going to die. Life was good. People were 
meant to be happy. You desired proof of this? Very well. 
Take a spade and dig into the soil. What did you find? 
Beautiful old statues. Beautiful old vases. Ruins of ancient 
buildings. All these tilings were made by the people of the 
greatest empire that ever existed. They ruled all the world 
for a thousand years. They were strong and rich and hand¬ 
some (just look at that bust of tbe Emperor Augustus!). Of 
course, they were not Christians and they would never be 
able to enter Heaven. At best they would spend their days 
in purgatory, where Dante had just paid them a visit. 

But who cared? To have lived in a world like that of 
ancient Rome was heaven enough for any mortal being. And 
anyway, we live but once. Let us be happy while we live. 

Such, in short, was the spirit that had begun to fill the 
narrow and crooked streets of the many little Italian cities. 

You know what we mean by the “bicycle craze” or the 
“automobile craze.” Some one invents a bicycle. People who 
for hundreds of thousands of years have moved slowly and 
painfully from one place to another go “crazy” over the pros¬ 
pect of rolling rapidly and easily over hill and dale. Then 
a clever mechanic makes the first automobile. No longer is it 
necessary to pedal and pedal and pedal. You just sit and 
let little drops of gasoline do the work for you. Then every¬ 
body wants an automobile. Everybody talks about Rolls- 
Royces and Flivvers and carburetors and mileage and oil. Ex¬ 
plorers penetrate into the hearts of unknown countries that 
they may find new supplies of gas. Forests arise in Sumatra 
and in the Congo to supply us with rubber. Rubber and oil 
become so valuable that people fight wars for their possession. 
The whole world is “automobile mad” and little children can 

say “car” before they learn to whisper “papa” and “mamma.” 
•/ * 


208 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


In the fourteenth century, the Italian people went crazy 
about the newly discovered beauties of the buried world of 
Rome. Soon their enthusiasm was shared by all the people of 
western Europe. The finding* of an unknown manuscript be¬ 
came the excuse for a civic holiday. The man who wrote a 
grammar became as popular as the fellow who nowadays in¬ 
vents a new spark plug. The humanist, the scholar who de¬ 
voted his time and his energies to a study of mankind (instead 
of wasting his hours upon fruitless theological investigations), 
that man was regarded with greater honor and a deeper re¬ 
spect than was ever bestowed upon a hero who had just con¬ 
quered all the Cannibal Islands. 

In the midst of this intellectual upheaval, an event occurred 
which greatly favored the study of the ancient philosophers 
and authors. The Turks were renewing their attacks upon 
Europe. Constantinople, capital of the last remnant of the 
original Roman Empire, was hard pressed. In the year 1393 
the emperor sent a Greek messenger to western Europe to 
explain the desperate state of old Byzantium and to ask for 
aid. This aid never came. The Roman Catholic world was 
more than willing to see the Greek Catholic world go to the 
punishment that awaited such wicked heretics. But however 
indifferent western Europe might be to the fate of the Byzan¬ 
tines, they were greatly interested in the ancient Greeks whose 
colonists had founded the city on the Bosphorus five centuries 
after the Trojan war. They wanted to learn Greek that they 
might read Aristotle and Homer and Plato. They wanted to 
learn it very badly, but they had no books and no grammars 
and no teachers. 

The magistrates of Florence heard of the visit of the Greek 
messenger. The people of their city were “crazy to learn 
Greek.” Would he please come and teach them? He 
would, and behold! the first professor of Greek, teaching alpha, 
beta, gamma to hundreds of eager young men begging their 
way to the city of the Arno, living in stables and in dingy 
attics that they might enter into the companionship of Soph¬ 
ocles and Homer. 


THE RENAISSANCE 


209 


Meanwhile, in the universities, the old Schoolmen, teaching 
their ancient theology and their antiquated logic, explaining 
the hidden mysteries of the Old Testament, and discussing the 
strange science of their Greek-Arabic-Spanish-Latin edition of 
Aristotle, looked on in dismay and horror. Next, they turned 
angry. This thing was going too far. The young men were 
deserting the lecture halls of the established universities to 
go and listen to some wild-eyed “humanist” with his new¬ 
fangled notions about a “reborn civilization.” 

They went to the authorities. They complained. But one 
cannot force an unwilling horse to drink and one cannot 
make unwilling ears listen to something which does not really 
interest them. The Schoolmen were losing ground rapidly. 
Here and there they scored a short victory. They combined 
forces with those fanatics who hated to see other people enjoy a 
happiness which was foreign to their own souls. In Florence, 
the center of the Great Rebirth, a terrible fight was fought 
between the old order and the new. Savonarola, a Dominican 
monk, sour of face and bitter in his hatred of beauty, was the 
leader of the medieval rear-guard. He fought a valiant battle. 
Day after day he thundered his warnings of God’s holy wrath. 
“Repent,” he cried, “repent of your godlessness, of your joy in 
things that are not holy!” He began to hear voices and to see 
flaming swords that flashed through the sky. He preached to 
the little children that they might not fall into the errors of 
these ways which were leading their fathers to perdition. He 
organized companies of boy scouts, devoted to the service of 
the great God whose prophet he claimed to be. In a sudden 
moment of frenzy, the frightened people promised to do pen¬ 
ance for their wicked love of beauty and pleasure. They car¬ 
ried their books and their statues and their paintings to the 
market place and celebrated a wild “carnival of the vanities” 
with holy singing and most unholy dancing, while Savonarola 
applied his torch to the accumulated treasures. 

But when the ashes cooled down, the people began to realize 
what they had lost. This terrible fanatic had made them de¬ 
stroy that which they had come to love above all things. They 


210 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


turned against him. Savonarola was thrown into jail. He was 
tortured. But he refused to repent for anything he had done. 
He was an honest man. He had tried to live a holy life. He 
had willingly destroyed those who deliberately refused to share 
his own point of view. It had been his duty to eradicate evil 
wherever he found it. A love of heathenish books and heathen¬ 
ish beauty, in the eyes of this faithful son of the Church, had 
been an evil. But he stood alone. He had fought the battle 
of a time that was dead and gone. The pope in Rome never 
moved a finger to save him. On the contrary, he approved 
of his “faithful Florentines” when they dragged Savonarola 
to the gallows, hanged him, and burned his body amidst the 
cheerful howling and yelling of the mob. 

It was a sad ending, but quite inevitable. Savonarola 
would have been a great man in the eleventh century. In the 
fifteenth century he was merely the leader of a lost cause. 


THE AGE OF EXPRESSION 


In the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent 
seventy-two of his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls 
of the cloister of Mount St. Agnes near the good Dutch town 
of Zwolle. He was known as Brother Thomas and because he 
had been born in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas 
a Kempis. At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, 
where Gerhard Groot had founded the Society of the Brothers 
of the Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen 
who tried to live the simple life of the early Apostles of Christ 
while working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house- 
painters and stone masons. They maintained an excellent 
school, that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught 
the wisdom of the Fathers of the Church. At this school, little 
Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and how 
to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had put his 
little bundle of books upon his back, had wandered to Zwolle, 
and with a sigh of relief had closed the door upon a turbulent 
world which did not attract him. 

Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence, and sudden 
death. In central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of 
Johannes Huss, the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the 
English reformer, were avenging with a terrible warfare the 
death of their beloved leader who had been burned at the stake 
by order of that same Council of Constance which had promised 
him a safe-conduct if he would come to Switzerland and ex¬ 
plain his doctrines to the pope, the emperor, twenty-three car- 


211 









THE CATHEDRAL 


























THE AGE OE EXPRESSION 


213 


dinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops, one hundred and 
fifty abbots and more than a hundred princes and dukes who 
had gathered to reform their church. 

In the West, France had been fighting for a hundred years 
that she might drive the English from her territories and" just 
then was saved from utter defeat by the fortunate appearance 
of Joan of Arc. And no sooner had this struggle come to an 
end than France and Burgundy were at each other’s throat, 
engaged upon a struggle of life and death for the supremacy 
of western Europe. 

In the South, a pope at Rome was calling the curses of 
Heaven down upon a second pope who resided at Avignon, 
in southern France, and who retaliated in kind. In the Far 
East, the Turks were destroying the last remnants of the 
Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final 
crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters. 

But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never 
heard. He had his manuscripts and his own thoughts and 
he was contented. He poured his love of God into a little 
volume. He called it the Imitation of Christ. It has since 
been translated into more languages than any other book save 
the Bible. It has been read by quite as many people as ever 
studied the Holy Scriptures. It has influenced the lives of 
countless millions. And it was the work of a man whose high¬ 
est ideal of existence was expressed in the simple wish that 
“he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little corner with 
a little book.” 

Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the 
middle ages. Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the 
victorious Renaissance, with the humanists loudly proclaim¬ 
ing the coming of modern times, the middle ages gathered 
strength for a last sally. Monasteries were reformed. Monks 
gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple, straightforward, 
and honest men, by the example of their blameless and devout 
lives, tried to bring the people back to the ways of righteous¬ 
ness and humble resignation to the will of God. But all to 
no avail. The new world rushed past these good people. The 


214 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


days of quiet meditation were gone. The great era of “ex¬ 
pression” had begun. 

Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use 
so many “big words.” I wish that I could write this history in 
words of one syllable. But it cannot he done. You cannot 
write a textbook of geometry without reference to a hypote¬ 
nuse and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped. You 
simply have to learn what those words mean or do without 
mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will eventually 
be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of 
Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now? 

When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression, 
I mean this: People were no longer contented to be the audi¬ 
ence and sit still while the emperor and the pope told them 
what to do and what to think. They wanted to he actors upon 
the stage of life. They insisted upon giving “expression” 
to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be in¬ 
terested in statesmanship like the Florentine historian, Niccolo 



THE MANUSCRIPT AND THE PRINTED BOOK 


















































THE AGE OF EXPRESSION 


215 


Macchiavelli, then lie “expressed” himself in his books, which 
revealed his own idea of a successful state and an efficient 
ruler. If on the other hand he had a liking for painting, he 
“expressed” his love for beautiful lines and lovely colors in 
the pictures which have made the names of Giotto, Fra An¬ 
gelico, Rafael, and a thousand others, household words wher¬ 
ever people have learned to care for those things which express 
a true and lasting beauty. 

If this love for color and line happened to be combined with 
an interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leo¬ 
nardo da Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with 
his balloons and flying machines, drained the marshes of the 
Lombardian plains, and “expressed” his joy and interest in all 
things between Heaven and Earth in prose, in painting, in 
sculpture, and in curiously conceived engines. When a man of 
gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush and 
the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture 
and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures out 
of heavy blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church 
of St. Peter, the most concrete “expression” of the glories 
of the triumphant Church. And so it went. 

All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with 
men and women who lived that they might add their mite to 
the sum total of our accumulated treasures of knowledge and 
beauty and wisdom. In Germany, in the city of Mainz, Johann 
Gutenberg had just invented a new method of copying books. 
He had studied the old woodcuts and had perfected a system 
by which individual letters of soft lead could be placed in such 
a way that they formed words and whole pages. It is true, 
he soon lost all his money in a lawsuit which had to do with 
the original invention of the press. He died in poverty, but 
the “expression” of his particular inventive genius lived after 
him. 

Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in 
Antwerp and Froben in Basel were flooding the world with 
carefully edited editions of the classics printed in the Gothic 
letters of the Gutenberg Bible, or printed in the Italian type 


216 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


which we use in this book, or printed in Greek letters, or in 
Hebrew. 

Then the whole world became the eager audience of those 
who had something to say. The day when learning had been 
a monopoly of a privileged few came to an end. And the 
last excuse for ignorance was removed from this world, when 
Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his cheap and popular 
editions. Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Horace and 
Pliny, all the goodly company of the ancient authors and 
philosophers and scientists, offered to become man’s faithful 
friend in exchange for a few paltry pennies. Humanism had 
made all men free and equal before the printed word. 


THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 


The Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of travel¬ 
ing. But very few people had ever ventured beyond the well- 
known beaten track which led from Venice to Jaffe. In the 
thirteenth century the Polo brothers, merchants of Venice, 
had wandered across the great Mongolian desert and after 
climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found their 
way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty 
emperor of China. The son of one of the Polos, by the name 
of Marco, had written a book about their adventures, which 
covered a period of more than twenty years. The astonished 
world had gaped at his descriptions of the golden towers of 
the strange island of Zipangu, which was his Italian way of 
spelling Japan. Many people had wanted to go east, that 
they might find this gold-land and grow rich. But the trip was 
too far and too dangerous, and so they stayed at home. 

Of course, there was always the possibility of making the 
voyage by sea. But the sea was very unpopular in the middle 
ages and for many very good reasons. In the first place, ships 
were very small. The vessels on which the followers of Magel¬ 
lan made their famous trip, which lasted many years, were 
not as large as a modern ferryboat. They carried from twenty 
to fifty men, who lived in dingy quarters (too low to allow any 
of them to stand up straight), and the sailors were obliged to 
eat poorly cooked food, as the kitchen arrangements were very 
bad and no fire could be made whenever the weather was the 
least bit rough. The medieval world knew how to pickle her- 


217 










218 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


ring and how to dry fish. But there were no canned goods, 
and fresh vegetables were never seen on the bill of fare as 
soon as the coast had been left behind. Water was carried in 
small barrels. It soon became stale and then tasted of rotten 
wood and iron rust and was full of slimy growing things. As 



MARCO POLO 


the people of the middle ages knew nothing about microbes 
(Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the thirteenth century, 
seems to have suspected their existence, but he wisely kept 
his discovery to himself), they*often drank unclean water and 
sometimes the whole crew died of typhoid fever. Indeed the 
mortality on hoard the ships of the earliest navigators was 
terrible. Of the two hundred sailors who in the year 1519 left 
Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage around 
the world, only eighteen returned. As late as the seventeenth 
century, when there was a brisk trade between western Europe 
and the Indies, a mortality of 40 per cent was nothing unusual 
for a trip from Amsterdam to Batavia and back. The greater 




THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 


219 


part of these victims died of scurvy, a disease which is caused 
by lack of fresh vegetables and which affects the gums and 
poisons the blood until the patient dies of sheer exhaustion. 

Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea 
did not attract the best elements of the population. Famous 
discoverers like Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama 
traveled at the head of crews that were almost entirely com¬ 
posed of ex-jailbirds, future murderers, and pickpockets out 
of a job. 

These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the 
courage and the pluck with which they accomplished their hope¬ 
less tasks in the face of difficulties of which the people of our 
own comfortable world can have no conception. Their ships 
were leaky. The rigging was clumsy. Since the middle of the 
thirteenth century they had possessed some sort of compass 
(which had come to Europe from China by way of Arabia and 
the Crusades) but they had very bad and incorrect maps. They 
set their course by guess. If luck was with them they returned 
after one or two or three vears. In the other case, their bleeched 
bones remained behind on some lonely beach. But they were 
true pioneers. They gambled with luck. Life to them was a 
glorious adventure. And all the suffering, the thirst, and the 
hunger and the pain were forgotten when their eyes beheld the 
dim outlines of a new coast or the placid waters of an ocean 
that had lain forgotten since the beginning of time. 

Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages 
long. The subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating. 
But history, to give you a true idea of past times, should he 
like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should 
cast a vivid light on certain important causes, on those which 
are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow 
or should be indicated by a few lines. And in this chapter I 
can only give you a short list of the most important discoveries. 

Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries the navigators were trying to accomplish just one 
thing —they wanted to find a comfortable and safe road to the 
empire of Cathay (China), to the island of Zipangu (Japan), 




IIOW THE WORLD GREW LARGER 


















THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 


221 


and to those mysterious islands where grew the spices which 
the medieval world had come to like since the days of the 
Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the 
introduction of cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very 
quickly and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of 
pepper or nutmeg. 

The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navi¬ 
gators of the Mediterranean, but the honor for exploring the 
coast of the Atlantic goes to the Portuguese. Spain and Por- 
tugal were full of that patriotic energy which their age-old 
struggle against the Moorish invaders had developed. Such 
energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new channels. 
In the thirteenth century, King Alphonso III had conquered 
the kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the 
Spanish peninsula and had added it to his dominions. In the 
next century, the Portuguese had turned the tables on the 
Mohammedans and made conquests beyond the Strait of 
Gibraltar. 

They were ready to begin their career as explorers. 

In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the 
Navigator, began to make preparations for the systematic ex¬ 
ploration of northwestern Africa. Before this, that hot and 
sandy coast had been visited by the Phoenicians and bv the 
Norsemen, who remembered it as the home of the hairy “wild 
man” whom we have come to know as the gorilla. One after 
another, Prince Henry and his captains discovered the Canary 
Islands; rediscovered the island of Madeira, which a cen¬ 
tury before had been visited by a Genoese ship; carefully 
charted the Azores, which had been vaguely known to both 
the Portuguese and the Spaniards; and caught a glimpse of 
the mouth of the Senegal River on the west coast of Africa, 
which they supposed to be the western mouth of the Nile. At 
last, by the middle of the fifteenth century, they saw Cape 
Verde, or the Green Cape, and the Cape Verde Islands, which 
lie almost halfway between the coast of Africa and Brazil. 

But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to 
the waters of the ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order 


222 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of Christ. This was a Portuguese eontinuation of the cru¬ 
sading order of the Templars which had been abolished by 
Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the request of King Philip 
the Fair of France, who had improved the occasion by burning 
his own Templars at the stake and stealing all their posses¬ 
sions. Prince Henry used the revenues of the domains of his 
religious order to equip several expeditions which explored the 
hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea. 



Tfta u/o*L2> As C.QLUMj3uj Bcuai/e& /r To 


THE WORLD OF COLUMBUS 





THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 


223 


But lie was still very much a son of the middle ages and 
spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a 
search for the mysterious “Prester John,” the mythical Chris¬ 
tian priest who was said to be the emperor of a vast empire 
“situated somewhere in the east.” The story of this strange 
potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the 
twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried 
to find “Prester John” and his descendants. Henry took part 
in the search. Thirty years after his death, the riddle was 
solved. 

In the year 1480 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land 
of Prester John by sea, had reached the southernmost point 
of Africa. At first he called it the Storm Cape, on account of 
the strong winds which had prevented him from continuing his 
voyage toward the east, but the Lisbon pilots who understood 
the importance of this discovery in their quest for the India 
water route, changed the name into that of the Cape of Good 
Hope. 

One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters 
of credit on the House of Medici, started upon a similar mis¬ 
sion by land. He crossed the Mediterranean and after leaving 
Egypt he traveled southward. He reached Aden, and from 
there, traveling through the waters of the Persian Gulf, which 
few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great 
eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the 
coast of India. There he got a great deal of news about the 
island of the Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie 
halfway between Africa and India. Then he returned, paid 
a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea 
once more, and in the year 1490 discovered the realm of Pres¬ 
ter John, who was no one less than the king of Abyssinia, 
whose ancestors had adopted Christianity in the fourth century, 
seven hundred years before the Christian missionaries had 
found their way to Scandinavia. 

These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geog¬ 
raphers and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies 
by an eastern sea route was possible, it was by no means easy. 


224 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Then there arose a great debate. Some people wanted to con¬ 
tinue the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope. Others 
said, “No, we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we 
shall reach Cathay.” 

Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that 
day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a 
pancake but was round. The Ptolemean system of the uni¬ 
verse, invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy, the 
great Egyptian geographer, who had lived in the second cen¬ 
tury of our era, which had served the simple needs of the men 
of the middle ages, had long been discarded by the scientists of 
the Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the Polish 
mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies had con¬ 
vinced him that the earth was one of a number of round planets 
which turned around the sun. The belief in the roundness of 
the earth was common among the nautical experts and, as I 
said, they were now debating the respective advantages of the 
eastern and the western routes. 

Among the advocates of the western route was a Genoese 
mariner by the name of Cristoforo Colombo. He was the son 
of a wool merchant. He seems to have been a student at the 
University of Pavia, where he specialized in mathematics and 
geometry. Then he took up his father’s trade, but soon we find 
him in Chios, in the eastern Mediterranean, traveling on busi¬ 
ness. Thereafter we hear of voyages to England, but whether 
he went north in search of wool or as the captain of a ship we 
do not know. In February of the year 1477, Colombo (if we 
are to believe his own words) visited Iceland; but very likely 
he only got as far as the Faroe Islands, which are cold enough 
in February to be mistaken for Iceland by anyone. Here 
Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen who 
in the tenth century had settled in Greenland and who had 
visited America in the eleventh century, when Leif’s vessel 
had been blown to the coast of Vineland, or Labrador. 

What had become of those far western colonies no one 
knew. The American colony founded in the year 1003 had 
been discontinued three years later on account of the hostility 


THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 

of the Eskimos. As for Greenland, not a 
heard from the settlers since the year 1440. 

Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death, which had just 
killed half the people of Norway. However that might he, the 
tradition of a “vast land in the distant west” still survived 
among the people of Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and 
Colombo must have heard of it. He gathered further informa- 




225 


word had been 
Very likely the 


THE GREAT DISCOVERIES, WESTERN HEMISPHERE 











226 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


tion among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands and 
then went to Portugal, where he married the daughter of one 
of the captains who had served under Prince Henry the Navi¬ 
gator. 

From that moment on (the year 1478) he devoted himself 
to the quest of the western route to the Indies. He sent his 
plans for such a voyage to the courts of Portugal and Spain. 





'> !Xt. 








zvrnm*3* 


■■pwa mmmm 


CV\N.\ , . 




■s-' 




THE GREAT DISCOVERIES, EASTERN HEMISPHERE 
















THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 


227 


The Portuguese, who felt certain that they possessed a monop¬ 
oly of the eastern route, would not listen to his plans. In 
Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose 
marriage in 1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom, were 
busy driving the Moors from their last stronghold, Granada. 
They had no money for risky expeditions. They needed every 
peseta for their soldiers. 

Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for 
their ideas as this brave Italian. But the story of Colombo 
(or Columbus, as we call him) is too well known to bear re¬ 
peating. The Moors surrendered Granada on the second of 
January of the year 1492. In the month of April of the same 
year, Columbus signed a contract with the king and queen of 
Spain. On Friday, the 3d of August, he left Palos with three 
little ships and a crew of 88 men, many of whom were criminals 
who had been offered indemnity if they joined the expedition. 
At two o’clock in the morning of Friday, the 12th of October, 

Columbus discovered land. On the fourth of Januarv of the 

%/ 

year 1493, Columbus waved farewell to the 44 men of the 
little fortress of La Navidad (none of whom was ever again 
seen alive) and returned homeward. By the middle of Febru¬ 
ary he reached the Azores, where the Portuguese threatened 
to throw him into jail. On the fifteenth of March, 1493, the 
admiral reached Palos and together with his Indians (for he 
was convinced that he had discovered some outlying islands of 
the Indies and called the natives red Indians) he hastened to 
Barcelona to tell his faithful patrons that he had been success¬ 
ful and that the road to the gold and the silver of Cathay and 
Zipangu was at the disposal of their most Catholic Majesties, 

Alas, Columbus never knew the truth. Towards the end 
of his life, on his fourth voyage, when he had touched the main¬ 
land of South America, he may have suspected that all was 
not well with his discovery. But he died in the firm belief 
that there was no solid continent between Europe and Asia 
and that he had found the direct route to China. 

Meanwhile, the Portuguese, sticking to their eastern route, 
had been more fortunate. In the year 1498, Vasco da Gama 


228 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


had been able to reach the coast of Malabar and return safely 
to Lisbon with a cargo of spice. In the year 1502 he had 
repeated the visit. But along the western route, the work of 
exploration had been most disappointing. In 1497 and 1498 
John and Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a passage to Japan, 
but they had seen nothing but the snowbound coasts and the 
rocks of Newfoundland, which had first been sighted by the 
Northmen, five centuries before. Amerigo Vespucci, a Floren¬ 
tine who gave his name to our continent, had explored the 
coast of Brazil but had found not a trace of the Indies. 

In the year 1513, seven years after the death of Columbus, 
the truth at last began to dawn upon the geographers of 
Europe. Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama, had 
climbed the famous peak in Darien, and had looked down upon 
a vast expanse of water which seemed to suggest the existence 
of another ocean. 

Finally in the year 1519 a fleet of five small Spanish ships 
under the command of the Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand de 
Magellan, sailed westward (not eastward since that route was 
absolutely in the hands of the Portuguese, who allowed no 
competition) in search of the Spice Islands. Magellan crossed 
the Atlantic between Africa and Brazil and sailed southward. 
He reached a narrow channel between the southernmost point 
of Patagonia, the “land of the people with the big feet,” and 
the Fire Island (so named on account of a fire, the only sign of 
the existence of natives, which the sailors watched one night). 
For almost five weeks the ships of Magellan were at the mercy 
of the terrible storms and blizzards which swept through the 
straits. A mutiny broke out among the sailors. Magellan 
suppressed it with terrible severity and sent two of his men 
on shore where they were left to repent of their sins at leisure. 
At last the storms quieted down, the channel broadened, and 
Magellan entered a new ocean. Its waves were quiet and 
placid. He called it the Peaceful Sea, the Mare Pacifico. 
Then he continued in a westerly direction. He sailed for 
ninety-eight days without seeing land. His people almost 
perished from hunger and thirst and ate the rats that infested 


I 


THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 


229 


the ships, and when these were all gone they chewed pieces of 
sail to still their gnawing hunger. 

In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called 
it the land ot the Ladrones (which means robbers) because the 



MAGELLAN 


natives stole everything they could lay hands on. Then fur¬ 
ther westward to the Spice Islands! 

Again land was sighted—a group of lonely islands. Ma¬ 
gellan called them the Philippines, after Philip, the son of his 
master Charles V, the Philip II of unpleasant historical mem¬ 
ory. At first Magellan was well received, but when he used 
the guns of his ships to make Christian converts he was killed 
hv the aborigines, together with a number of his captains and 
sailors. The survivors burned one of the three remaining ships 
pnd continued their voyage. They found the Moluccas, the 
famous Spice Islands; they sighted Borneo and reached Tidor. 


























230 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


There, one of the two ships, too leaky to be of further use, 
remained behind with her crew. The “Vittoria,” under Sebas¬ 
tian del Cano, crossed the Indian Ocean, missed seeing the 
northern coast of Australia (which was not discovered until 
the first half of the seventeenth century when ships of the 
Dutch East India Company explored this flat and inhospitable 
continent), and after great hardships reached Spain. 

This was the most notable of all voyages. It had taken 
three years. It had been accomplished at a great cost both of 
men and of money. But it had established the fact that the 
earth was round and that the new lands discovered by Colum¬ 
bus were not a part of the Indies but a separate continent. 
From that time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all their ener¬ 
gies to the development of their Indian and American trade. 
To prevent an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alex¬ 
ander VI had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts 
by a line of demarkation which followed the 50th degree of 
longitude west of Greenwich, the so-called division of Tor- 
desillas of 1494. The Portuguese were to establish their colo¬ 
nies to the east of this line, the Spaniards were to have theirs 
to the west. This accounts for the fact that the entire Ameri¬ 
can continent with the exception of Brazil became Spanish and 
that all of the Indies and most of Africa became Portuguese, 
until the English and the Dutch colonists (who had no respect 
for papal decisions) took these possessions away in the seven¬ 
teenth and eighteenth centuries. 

When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the 
Rialto of Venice, the Wall Street of the middle ages, there 
was a terrible panic. Stocks and bonds went down 40 and 50 
per cent. After a short while, when it appeared that Columbus 
had failed to find the road to Cathay, the Venetian merchants 
recovered from their fright. But the voyage of da Gama and 
Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water 
route to the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice, 
the two great commercial centers of the middle ages and the 
Renaissance, began to be sorry that they had refused to listen 
to Columbus. But it was too late. Their Mediterranean be- 



FINDING A NEW WORLD 





















232 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


came an inland sea. The overland trade to the Indies and 
China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old days 
of Italian glory were gone. The Atlantic became the new 
center of commerce and therefore the center of civilization. 
It has remained so ever since. 

See how strangely civilization has progressed since those 
early days, fifty centuries before, when the inhabitants of the 
valley of the Nile began to keep a written record of events. 
From the River Nile, it went to Mesopotamia, the land be¬ 
tween the rivers. Then came the turn of Crete and Greece and 
Rome. An inland sea became the center of trade and the cities 
along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science and 
philosophy and learning. In the sixteenth century it moved 
westward once more and made the countries that border upon 
the Atlantic become the masters of the earth. 

There are those who say that the World War and the sui¬ 
cide of the great European nations have greatly diminished the 
importance of the Atlantic Ocean. They expect to see civiliza¬ 
tion cross the American continent and find a new home in the 
Pacific. But I doubt this. 

The westward advance of civilization was accompanied by a 
steady increase in the size of ships and a broadening of the 
knowledge of the navigators. The flat-bottomed vessels of the 
Nile and the Euphrates were replaced by the sailing vessels of 
the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, and the 
Romans. These in turn were discarded for the square-rigged 
vessels of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. And the latter 
were driven from the ocean by the full-rigged craft of the 
English and the Dutch. 

At present, however, civilization no longer depends solely 
upon ships. Aircraft have begun to take the place of the 
sailing vessel and the steamer. The next center of civilization 
will depend perhaps upon the development of aircraft, and 
the sea once more shall be the undisturbed home of the little 
fishes, who once upon a time shared their deep residence with 
the earliest ancestors of the human race. 


BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 


The discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards had 
brought the Christians of western Europe into close contact 
with the people of India and of China. They knew of course 
that Christianity was not the only religion on this earth. There 
were the Mohammedans and the heathenish tribes of northern 
Africa who worshipped sticks and stones and dead trees. But 
in India and in China the Christian conquerors found new 
millions who had never heard of Christ and who did not want 
to hear of Him, because they thought their own religion, which 
was thousands of years old, much better than that of the West. 
As this is a story of mankind and not an exclusive history of 
the people of Europe and our western hemisphere, you ought 
to know something of two men whose teaching and whose 
example continue to influence the actions and the thoughts 
of the majority of our fellow-travelers on this earth. 

In India, Buddha was recognized as the great religious 
teacher. His history is an interesting one. He was born in 
the sixth century before the birth of Christ, within sight of the 
mighty Himalaya Mountains, where four hundred years before 
Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the first of the great leaders of 
the Aryan race, had taught his people to regard life as a con¬ 
tinuous struggle between the gods of evil and good. Buddha’s 
father was Suddhodana, a mighty chief among the tribe of the 
Sakiyas. His mother, Maha Maya, was the daughter of a 
neighboring king. She had been married when she was a very 
young girl. But many moons had passed beyond the distant 


233 








234 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


ridge of hills and still her husband was without an heir who 
should rule his lands after him. At last, when she was fifty 
years old, her day came, and she went forth that she might be 
among her own people when her baby should come into this 
world. 

It was a long trip to the land of the Koliyans, where Maha 
Maya had spent her earliest years. One night she was resting 
among the cool trees of the garden of Lumbini. There her 
son was born. He was given the name of Siddhartha, but we 
know him as Buddha, which means the Enlightened One. 

In due time, Siddhartha grew up to be a handsome young 
prince, and when he was nineteen years old he was married to 
his cousin Yasodhara. During the next ten years he lived 
far away from all pain and suffering, behind the protecting 
walls of the royal palace, awaiting the day when he should 
succeed his father as king of the Sakiyas. 

But it happened that when he was thirty years old, he drove 
outside of the palace gates and saw a man who was old and 
worn out with labor and whose weak limbs could hardly carry 
the burden of life. Siddhartha pointed him out to his coach¬ 
man, Channa, but Channa answered that there were lots of 
poor people in this world and that one more or less did not 
matter. The young prince was very sad, but he did not say 
anything and went back to live with his wife and his father 
and his mother and tried to be happy. A little while later he 
left the palace a second time. His carriage met a man who 
suffered from a terrible disease. Siddhartha asked Channa 
what had been the cause of this man’s suffering, but the coach¬ 
man answered that there were many sick people in this world 
and that such things could not be helped and did not matter 
very much. The young prince was very sad when he heard this, 
but again he returned to his people. 

A few weeks passed. One evening Siddhartha ordered his 
carriage in order to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly his 
horses were frightened by the sight of a dead man whose rot¬ 
ting body lay sprawling in the ditch beside the road. The 
young prince, who had never been allowed to see such things, 


I 





“a 


THE THREE GREAT RELIGIONS 


















286 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


was frightened, but Channa told him not to mind such trifles. 
The world was full of dead people. It was the rule of life that 
all things must come to an end. Nothing was eternal. The 
grave awaited us all and there was no escape. 

That evening, when Siddhartha returned to his home, he 
was received with music. While he was away his wife had 
given birth to a son. The people were delighted because now 
they knew that there was an heir to the throne, and they cele¬ 
brated the event by the heating of many drums. Siddhartha, 
however, did not share their joy. The curtain of life had been 
lifted and he had learned the horror of man’s existence. The 
sight of death and suffering followed him like a terrible dream. 

That night the moon was shining brightly. Siddhartha 
woke up and began to think of many things. Never again 
could he he happy until he should have found a solution to the 
riddle of existence. He decided to find it far awav from all 
those whom he loved. Softly he went into the room where 
Yasodhara was sleeping with her baby. Then he called for 
his faithful Channa and told him to follow. 

Together the two men went into the darkness of the night, 
one to find rest for his soul, the other to he a faithful servant 
unto a beloved master. 

The people of India among whom Siddhartha wandered for 
many years were just then in a state of change. Their ances¬ 
tors, the native Indians, had been conquered without great diffi¬ 
culty by the warlike Aryans (our distant cousins), and there¬ 
after the Aryans had been the rulers and masters of tens of 
millions of docile little brown men. To maintain themselves in 
the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population into 
different classes and gradually a system of “caste” of the most 
rigid sort had been enforced upon the natives. The descend¬ 
ants of the Indo-European conquerors belonged to the highest 
“caste,” the class of warriors and nobles. Next came the caste 
of the priests. Below these followed the peasants and the busi¬ 
ness men. The ancient natives, however, who were called 
Pariahs, formed a class of despised aiid miserable slaves and 
never could hope to he anything else. 


BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 


237 


Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The 
old Indo-Europeans during their thousands of years of wan¬ 
dering had met with many strange adventures. These had 
been colleeted in a book ealled the Veda. The language of 
this book is called Sanskrit, and it was closely related to the 
different languages of the European continent, to Greek and 
Latin and Russian and German and two-score others. The 
three highest castes were allowed to read these holy scriptures. 
The Pariah, however, the despised member of the lowest caste, 
was not permitted to know its contents. Woe to the man of 
noble or priestly caste who should teach a Pariah to study the 
sacred volume! 

The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in 
misery. Since this planet offered them very little joy, salva¬ 
tion from suffering must be found elsewhere. They tried to 
derive a little consolation from meditation upon the bliss of 
their future existence. 

Brahma, the all-creator who was regarded by the Indian 
people as the supreme ruler of life and death, was worshipped 
as the highest ideal of perfection. To become like Brahma, to 
lose all desire for riches and power, was recognized as the most 
exalted purpose of existence. Holy thoughts were regarded 
as more important than holy deeds, and many people went 
into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and starved 
their bodies that they might feed their souls with the glorious 
contemplation of the splendors of Brahma, the Wise, the Good, 
and the Merciful. 

Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wan¬ 
derers who were seeking the truth far away from the turmoil 
of the cities and the villages, decided to follow their example. 
He cut his hair. He took his pearls and his rubies and sent 
them back to his family with a message of farewell, which the 
ever faithful Channa carried. Without a single follower, the 
young prince then moved into the wilderness. 

Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the moun¬ 
tains. Five young men came to him and asked that they might 
be allowed to listen to his words of wisdom. He agreed to be 


238 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


their master if they would follow him. They consented, and 
he took them into the hills and for six years he taught them 
all he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the Vindhya Mountains. 
But at the end of this period of study, he felt that he was still 
far from perfection. The world that he had left continued to 
tempt him. He now asked that his pupils leave him, and then 
he fasted for forty-nine days and nights, sitting upon the roots 
of an old tree. At last he received his reward. In the dusk of 
the fiftieth evening, Brahma revealed himself to his faithful 
servant. From that moment on, Siddhartha was called Buddha 
and he was revered as the Enlightened One who had come to 
save men from their unhappy mortal fate. 

The last forty-five years of his life Buddha spent in the 
valley of the Ganges River, teaching his simple lesson of sub¬ 
mission and meekness unto all men. In the year 488 before 
our era, he died, full of years and beloved by millions of people. 
He had not preached his doctrines for the benefit of a single 
class. Even the lowest Pariah might call himself his disciple. 

This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and 
the merchants, who did their best to destroy a creed which rec¬ 
ognized the equality of all living creatures and offered men the 
hope of a second life (a reincarnation) under happier circum¬ 
stances. As soon as they could, they encouraged the people of 
India to return to the ancient doctrines of the Brahmin creed 
with its fasting and its tortures of the sinful body. But 
Buddhism could not be destroyed. Slowly the disciples of the 
Enlightened One wandered across the valleys of the Hima¬ 
layas and moved into China. They crossed the Yellow Sea 
and preached the wisdom of their master unto the people of 
Japan, and they faithfully obeyed the will of their great mas¬ 
ter, who had forbidden them to use force. To-day more people 
recognize Buddha as their teacher than ever before and their 
number surpasses that of the combined followers of Christ and 
Mohammed. 

As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his 
story is a simple one. He was born in the year 550 b.c. He 
led a quiet, dignified, and uneventful life at a time when China 



BUDDHA GOES INTO THE MOUNTAINS 







240 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


was without a strong central government and when the Chinese 
people were at the mercy of bandits and robber-barons who 
went from city to city, pillaging and stealing and murdering 
and turning the busy plains of northern and central China into 
a wilderness of starving people. 

Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He 
did not have much faith in the use of violence. He was a very 
peaceful person. He did not think that he could make people 
over by giving them a lot of new laws. He knew that the only 
possible salvation would come from a change of heart, and he 
set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of changing the char¬ 
acter of his millions of fellow men who inhabited the wide plains 
of eastern Asia. The Chinese had never been much interested 
in religion as we understand that word. They believed in 
devils and spooks as most primitive people do. But they had 
no prophets and recognized no “revealed truth.” Confucius 
is almost the only one among the great moral leaders who did 
not see visions, who did not proclaim himself as the messenger 
of a divine power; who did not, at some time or another, claim 
that he was inspired by voices from above. 

He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given 
to lonely wanderings and melancholy tunes upon his faithful 
flute. He asked for no recognition. He did not demand that 
anyone should follow him or worship him. He reminds us 
of the ancient Greek philosophers, especially those of the Stoic 
school, men who believed in right living and righteous think¬ 
ing without the hope of a reward but simply for the peace of 
the soul that comes with a good conscience. 

Confucius was a verv tolerant man. He went out of his 

•/ 

way to visit Lao-Tse, the other great Chinese leader and the 
founder of a philosophic system called “Taoism,” which was 
merely an early Chinese version of the Golden Rule. 

Confucius bore no hatred to anyone. He taught the virtue 
of supreme self-possession. A person of real worth, according 
to the teaching of Confucius, did not allow himself to be 
ruffled by anger and suffered whatever fate brought him with 
resignation. 



THE GREAT MORAL LEADERS 















































































































242 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


At first he had only a few students. Gradually the number 
increased. Before his death, in the year 478 b.c., several of the 
kings and the princes of China confessed themselves his dis¬ 
ciples. When Christ was born in Bethlehem, the philosophy of 
Confucius had already become a part of the mental make-up 
of most Chinamen. It has continued to influence their lives 
ever since. Not, however, in its pure, original form. Most reli¬ 
gions change as time goes on. Christ preached humility and 
meekness and absence from worldly ambitions, but fifteen 


centuries after Golgotha, the head of the Christian church was 
spending millions upon the erection of a building that bore 
little relation to the lonely stable of Bethlehem. 

Lao-Tse taught the Golden Rule, and in less than three 
centuries the ignorant masses had made him into a real and 
very cruel god and had buried his wise commandments under 
a rubbish-heap of superstition which made the lives of the aver¬ 
age Chinese one long series of frights and fears and horrors. 

Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honoring 
their father and their mother. They soon began to be more 
interested in the memory of their departed parents than in the 
happiness of their children and their grandchildren. Delib¬ 
erately they turned their backs upon the future and tried to 
peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the 
ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than 
disturb a cemetery situated upon the sunny and fertile side of 
a mountain, they would plant their rice and wheat upon the 
barren rocks of the other slope where nothing could possibly 
grow. And they preferred hunger and famine to the desecra¬ 
tion of the ancestral grave. 

At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite 
lost their hold upon the increasing millions of eastern Asia. 
Confucianism, with its profound sayings and shrewd observa¬ 
tions, added a touch of common-sense philosophy to the soul of 
every Chinaman and influenced his entire life, whether he was 
a simple laundryman in a steaming basement or the ruler of 
vast provinces who dwelt behind the high walls of a secluded 
palace. 


BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 


243 


In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivi¬ 
lized Christians of the western world came face to face with 
the older creeds of the East. The early Spaniards and Portu¬ 
guese looked upon the peaceful statues of Buddha and con¬ 
templated the venerable pictures of Confucius and did not in 
the least know what to make ol* those worthy prophets with 
their far-away smiles. They came to the easy conclusion that 
these strange divinities were just plain devils who represented 
something idolatrous and heretical and did not deserve the 
respect of the true sons of the Church. Whenever the spirit 
of Buddha or Confucius seemed to interfere with the trade in 
spices and silks, the Europeans attacked the “evil influence” 
with bullets and grapeshot. That system had certain very 
definite disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage 
of ill-will which promises little good for the immediate future. 


THE REFORMATION 


Of course you have heard of the Reformation. You think 
of a small but courageous group of pilgrims who crossed the 
ocean to have “freedom of religious worship.” Vaguely in the 
course of time (and more especially in our Protestant coun¬ 
tries) the Reformation has come to stand for the idea of 
“liberty of thought.” Martin Luther is represented as the 
leader of the vanguard of progress. But when history is 
something more than a series of flattering speeches addressed 
to our own glorious ancestors, when, to use the words of the 
German historian von Ranke, we try to discover what “actually 
happened,” then much of the past is seen in a very different 
light. 

Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely 
had. Few things are either black or white. It is the duty of 
the honest chronicler to give a true account of the good and 
had sides of every historical event. It is very difficult to do 
this, because we all have our personal likes and dislikes. But 
we ought to try to be as fair as we can be, and must not allow 
our prejudices to influence us too much. 

Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very 
Protestant center of a very Protestant country. I never saw 
any Catholics until I was about twelve years old. Then I felt 
very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a little bit afraid. 

many thousand people who had been 


244 












THE REFORMATION 


245 ' 


burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition 
when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their 
Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real 

e' 

to me. It seemed to have happened only the day before. It 
might occur again. There might be another Saint Bartholo¬ 
mew’s night, and they would slaughter poor little me in my 
nightie and throw my body out of the window, as had happened 
to the noble Admiral de Coligny. 

Much later 1 went to live for a number of years in a Catli- 
olic country. I found the people much pleasanter and much 
more tolerant than my former countrymen and quite as intelli¬ 
gent. To my great surprise, I began to discover that there 
was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as much as a 
Protestant. 

Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, who actually lived through the Reformation, did 
not see things that way. They were always right and their 
enemy was always wrong. It was a question of hang or be 
hanged, and both sides preferred to do the hanging. Which 
was no more than human and for which they deserve no blame. 

When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500, 
an easy date to remember, and the year in which the Emperor 
Charles V was born, this is what we see. The feudal disorder 
of the middle ages has given way before the order of a num¬ 
ber of highly centralized kingdoms. The most powerful of 
all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a cradle. 
He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maxi¬ 
milian of Hapsburg, the last of the medieval knights, and of 
his wife Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, the ambitious 
duke who had made successful war upon France but had been 
killed by the independent Swiss peasants. The child Charles, 
therefore, has fallen heir to the greater part of the map, to 
all the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins, and 
aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in Belgium, in 
Italy, and in Spain, together with all their colonies in Asia, 
Africa, and America. Bv a strange irony of fate, he has 
been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of 


246 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Flanders which the Germans used as a prison during their 
recent occupation of Belgium; and although a Spanish king 
and a German emperor, he receives the training of a Fleming. 

As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is 
never proved) and his mother has lost her mind (she is trav¬ 
eling through her domains with the coffin containing the body 
of her departed husband), the child is left to the strict disci¬ 
pline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and 
Italians and Spaniards and a score of strange races, Charles 
grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church, 
but quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy, 
both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule 
the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervor. 
He loves peace and quiet and he is always at war. At the 
age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon the human race 
in utter disgust at so much hate and so much stupidity. Three 
years later he dies, a very tired and disappointed man. 

So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church, 
the second great power in the world ? The Church has changed 
greatly since the early days of the middle ages, when it started 
out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of 
a pious and righteous life. In the first place, the Church has 
grown too rich. The pope is no longer the shepherd of a flock 
of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds 
himself with artists and musicians and famous literary men. 
His churches and chapels are covered with new pictures in 
which the saints look more like Greek gods than is strictly 
necessary. He divides his time unevenly between affairs of 
state and art. The affairs of state take ten per cent of his time. 
The other ninety per cent goes to an active interest in Roman 
statues, recently discovered Greek vases, plans for a new sum¬ 
mer home, the rehearsal of a new play. The archbishops and 
the cardinals follow the example of their pope. The bishops 
try to imitate the archbishops. The village priests, however, 
have remained faithful to their duties. They keep themselves 
aloof from the wicked world and the heathenish love of beauty 
and pleasure. They stay away from the monasteries, where 


THE REFORMATION 


247 


the monks seem to have forgotten their ancient vows of sim¬ 
plicity arid poverty and live as happily as they dare without 
causing too much of a public scandal. 

Finally, there are the common people. They are much 
better oft* than they have ever been before. They are more 
prosperous, they live in better houses, their children go to bet¬ 
ter schools, their cities are more beautiful than before, their 
firearms have made them the equal of their old enemies, the 
robber-barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy taxes 
upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the Reforma¬ 
tion. 

Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe, 
and then you will understand how the revival of learning and 
art was bound to be followed by a revival of religious inter¬ 
ests. The Renaissance began in Italy. From there it spread 
to France. It was not quite successful in Spain, where five 
hundred years of warfare with the Moors had made the people 
very narrow minded and very fanatical in all religious matters. 
The circle had grown wider and wider, but once the Alps had 
been crossed, the Renaissance had suffered a change. 

The people of northern Europe, living in a very different 
climate, had an outlook upon life which contrasted strangely 
with that of their southern neighbors. The Italians lived out 
in the open, under a sunny sky. The Germans, the Dutch, the 
English, and the Swedes spent most of their time indoors, lis¬ 
tening to the rain beating on the closed windows of their com¬ 
fortable little houses. They did not laugh quite so much. They 
took everything more seriously. They were forever conscious 
of their immortal souls, and they did not like to be funny about 
matters which they considered holy and sacred. The “human¬ 
istic” part of the Renaissance, the books, the studies of ancient 
authors, the grammar, and the textbooks, interested them 
greatly. But the general return to the old pagan civilization 
of Greece and Rome, which was one of the chief results of the 
Renaissance in Italy, filled their hearts with horror. 

But the papacy and the college of cardinals were almost 
entirely composed of Italians, and they had turned the Church 


248 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


into a pleasant club where people discussed art and music and 
the theater but rarely mentioned religion. Hence the split 
between the serious North and the more civilized but easy-going 
and indifferent South was growing wider and wider all the 
time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that threat¬ 
ened the Church. 

There were a few minor reasons which will explain why the 
Reformation took place in Germany rather than in Sweden 
or England. The Germans bore an ancient grudge against 
Rome. The endless quarrels between emperor and pope had 
caused much mutual bitterness. In the other European coun¬ 
tries where the government rested in the hands of a strong 
king, the ruler had often been able to protect his subjects 
against the greed of the priests. In Germany, where a shadowy 
emperor ruled a turbulent crowd of little princelings, the good 
burghers were more directly at the mercy of their bishops and 
prelates. These dignitaries were trying to collect large sums 
of money for the benefit of those enormous churches which 
were a hobby of the popes of the Renaissance. The Germans 
felt that they were being mulcted and quite naturally they did 
not like it. 

And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germanv 

•/ •/ 

was the home of the printing press. In northern Europe hooks 
were cheap, and the Bible was no longer a mysterious manu¬ 
script owned and explained by the priest. It was a household 
book of many families where Latin was understood bv the 
father and by the children. Whole families began to read it, 
which was against the law of the Church. They discovered that 
the priests were telling them many things which, according to 
the original text of the Holy Scriptures, were somewhat differ¬ 
ent. This caused doubt. People began to ask questions. And 
questions, when they cannot be answered, often cause a great 
deal of trouble. 

The attack began when the humanists of the North opened 
fire upon the monks. In their heart of hearts they still had 
too much respect and reverence for the pope to direct their 
sallies against his most holy person. But the lazy, ignorant 


THE REFORMATION 


249 


monks, living behind the sheltering walls of their rich monas¬ 
teries, offered rare sport. 

The leader in this warfare, curiously enough, was a very 
faithful son of the Church. Desiderius Erasmus was a poor 
boy, born in Rotterdam in Holland, and educated at the same 
Latin school of Deventer from which Thomas a Ivempis had 
graduated. He had become a priest and for a time had lived 
in a monastery. He had traveled a great deal and knew where¬ 
of he wrote. When he began 
his career as a public pam¬ 
phleteer (he would have been 
called an editorial writer in 
our day) the world was great¬ 
ly amused at an anonymous 
series of letters which had j ust 
appeared under the title of 
“Letters of Obscure Men.” 

In these letters, the general 
stupidity and arrogance of the 
monks of the late middle ages 
was exposed in a strange Ger- 
man-Latin doggerel which re¬ 
minds one of our modern 
limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned and serious 
scholar, who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first 
reliable version of the New Testament, which he translated 
into Latin together with a corrected edition of the original 
Greek text. But he believed with Horace, the Roman poet, 
that nothing prevents us from “stating the truth with a smile 
upon our lips.” 

In the year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng¬ 
land, he took a few weeks off and wrote a funny little hook, 
called the “Praise of Folly,” in which he attacked the monks 
and their credulous followers with that most dangerous of all 
weapons, humor. The booklet was the best seller of the six¬ 
teenth century. It was translated into almost every language, 
and it made people pay attention to those other books of 














250 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Erasmus in which he advocated reform of the many abuses of 
the Church and appealed to his fellow humanists to help him 
in his task of bringing about a great rebirth of the Christian 
faith. 

But nothing came of these excellent plans. Erasmus was 
too reasonable and too tolerant to please most of the enemies of 
the Church. They were waiting for a leader of a more robust 
nature. 

He came and his name was Martin Luther. 

Luther was a North-German peasant with a first-class 
brain and possessed of great personal courage. He was a uni¬ 
versity man, a master of arts of the LTniversity of Erfurt; 
afterward he joined a Dominican monastery. Then he became 
a college professor at the theological school of Wittenberg 
and began to explain the scriptures to the indifferent plough- 
boys of his Saxon home. He had a lot of spare time, and this 
he used to study the original texts of the Old and New Testa¬ 
ments. Soon he began to see the great difference which existed 
between the words of Christ and those that were preached by 
the popes and the bishops. 

In the year 1511, he visited Rome on official business. 
Alexander VI, of the family of Borgia, who had enriched him¬ 
self for the benefit of his son and daughter, was dead. But his 
successor, Julius II, a man of irreproachable personal char¬ 
acter, was spending most of his time fighting and building and 
did not impress this serious-minded German theologian with 
his piety. Luther returned to Wittenberg a much disappointed 
man. But worse was to follow. 

The gigantic church of St. Peter which Pope Julius had 
wished upon his innocent successor, although only half begun, 
was already in need of repair. Alexander VI had spent every 
penny of the papal treasury. Leo X, who succeeded Julius 
in the year 1513, was on the verge of bankruptcy. He reverted 
to an old method of raising ready cash. He began to sell 
“indulgences.” An indulgence was a piece of parchment which 
in return for a certain sum of money, promised a sinner a de¬ 
crease of the time which he would have to spend in purgatory. 


TH E RE I'OR MAT ION 


251 


It was a perfectly correct thing according to the creed of the 
late middle ages. Since the church had the power to forgive 
the sins of those who truly repented before they died, the 
church also had the right to shorten, through its intercession 
with the Saints, the time during which the soul must he puri¬ 
fied in the shadowy realms of purgatory. 

It was unfortunate that these indulgences must he sold for 
money. But they offered an easy form of revenue and besides, 
those who were too poor to pay received theirs for nothing. 

Now it happened in the year 1517 that the exclusive terri¬ 
tory for the sale of indulgences in Saxony was given to a 
Dominican monk by the name of Johann Tetzel. Brother 
Johann was a hustling salesman. To tell the truth he was a 
little too eager. His business methods outraged the pious 
people of the little duchy. And Luther, who was an honest 
fellow, got so angry that he did a rash thing. On the 31st of 
October of the year 1517 he went to the court church and upon 
the doors thereof he posted a sheet of paper with ninety-five 
statements, or theses, attacking the sale of indulgences. These 
statements had been written in Latin. Luther had no inten¬ 
tion of starting a riot. He was not a revolutionist. He ob¬ 
jected to the institution of the indulgences and he wanted his 
fellow professors to know what he thought about them. But 
this was still a private affair of the clerical and professional 
world and there was no appeal to the prejudices of the com¬ 
munity of laymen. 

Unfortunately, at that moment when the whole world had 
begun to take an interest in the religious affairs of the day, 
it was utterly impossible to discuss anything without at once 
creating a serious mental disturbance. In less than two months, 
all Europe was discussing the ninety-five theses of the Saxon 
monk. Every one must take sides. Every obscure little theo¬ 
logian must print his own opinion. The papal authorities 
began to be alarmed. They ordered the Wittenberg professor 
to proceed to Rome and give an account of his action. Luther 
wisely remembered what had happened to Huss. He stayed 
in Germany and he was punished with excommunication. 


252 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Luther burned the papal bull in the presence of an admiring 
multitude, and from that moment peace between himself and 
the pope was no longer possible. 

Without any desire on his part, Luther had become the 
leader of a vast army of discontented Christians. German 
patriots like Ulrich von Hutten rushed to his defence. The 
students of Wittenberg and Erfurt and Leipzig offered to 
defend him should the authorities try to imprison him. The 
Elector of Saxony reassured the eager young men. No harm 
would befall Luther as long as he stayed on Saxon ground. 

All this happened in the year 1520. Charles V was twenty 

years old and as the ruler of half the world was forced to 

remain on pleasant terms with the pope. He sent out calls 

for a Diet or general assembly in the good city of Worms on 

the Rhine and commanded Luther to be present and give an 

account of his extraordinary behavior. Luther, who now 

was the national hero of the Germans, went. He refused to 

take hack a single word of what he had ever written or said. 

His conscience was controlled onlv bv the word of God. He 

* • 

would live and die for his conscience. 

The Diet of Worms, after due deliberation, declared 
Luther an outlaw before God and man, and forbade all Ger¬ 
mans to give him shelter or food or drink, or to read a single 
word of the hook which the dastardlv heretic had written. 

fV 

Rut the great reformer was in no danger. By the majority 
of the Germans of the north the edict was denounced as a most 
unjust and outrageous document. For greater safety, Luther 
was hidden in the Wartburg, a castle belonging to the Elector 
of Saxony, and there he defied all papal authority by trans¬ 
lating the entire Bible into the German language, that all the 
people might read and know the word of God for themselves. 

By this time, the Reformation was no longer a spiritual 
and religious affair. 'Those who hated the beauty of the mod¬ 
ern church building used this period of unrest to attack and 
destroy what they did not like because they did not understand 
it. Impoverished knights tried to make up for past losses by 
grabbing the territory which belonged to the monasteries. 


THE REFORMATION 


253 


Discontented princes made use of the absence of the emperor 
to increase their own power. The starving peasants, follow¬ 
ing the leadership of half-crazy agitators, made the best of 
the opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and 
plundered and murdered and burned with the zeal of the old 
Crusaders. 

A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the 
Empire. Some princes became Protestants (as the “protest¬ 
ing” adherents of Luther were called) and persecuted their 
Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic and hanged their 
Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526 
tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering 
that “the subjects should all he of the same religious denomi¬ 
nation as their princes.” This turned Germany into a checker¬ 
board of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and 
created a situation which prevented the normal political growth 

for hundreds of vears. 

* 

In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put 
to rest in the same church where twenty-nine years before he 
had proclaimed his famous objections to the sale of indul¬ 
gences. In less than thirty years, the indifferent, joking, and 
laughing world of the Renaissance had been transformed into 
the arguing, quarreling, backbiting, debating society of the 
Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the popes 
came to a sudden end and the whole of western Europe was 
turned into a battlefield, where Protestants and Catholics 
killed each other for the greater glory of certain theological 
doctrines which are as incomprehensible to the present genera¬ 
tion as the mysterious inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans. 


RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of 
religious controversy. 

If you will notice you will find that almost everybody 
around you is forever “talking economics” and discussing 
wages and hours of labor and strikes in their relation to the 
life of the community, for that is the main topic of interest 
of our own time. 

The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared 
worse. They never heard anything hut “religion.” Their 
heads were filled with “predestination,” “transubstantiation,” 
“free will,” and a hundred other queer words, expressing 
obscure points of the “true faith,” whether Catholic or Prot¬ 
estant. According to the desire of their parents they were 
baptized Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians 
or Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augs¬ 
burg catechism, composed by Luther, or from the “Institutes 
of Christianity,” written by Calvin, or they mumbled the 
Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith, which were printed in the Eng¬ 
lish Book of Common Prayer, and they were told that these 
alone represented the “true faith.” 

They heard of the wholesale theft of church property per¬ 
petrated by King Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of 
England, who made himself the supreme head of the English 
church, and assumed the old papal rights of appointing bish¬ 
ops and priests. They had a nightmare whenever someone 


254 







RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


255 


mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and its 
many torture chambers, and they were treated to equally hor¬ 
rible stories of how a mob of outraged Dutch Protestants had 
got hold of a dozen defenceless old priests and hanged them 
for the sheer pleasure of killing those who professed a different 
faith. It was unfortunate that the two contending parties were 
so equally matched. Other¬ 
wise the struggle would 
have come to a quick solu¬ 
tion. Now it dragged on 
for eight generations, and 
it grew so complicated that 
I can only tell you the 
most important details, 
and must ask you to get the 
rest from one of the many 
histories of the Reforma¬ 
tion. 

The great reform move¬ 
ment of the Protestants 
had been followed by 
a thoroughgoing reform 
within the bosom of the 
Church. Those popes who 
had been merely amateur 
humanists and dealers in 
Roman and Greek antiqui¬ 
ties, disappeared from the 
scene and their place was 
taken by serious men who spent twenty hours a day admin¬ 
istering those holy duties which had been placed in their hands. 

The long and rather disgraceful happiness of the monas¬ 
teries came to an end. Monks and nuns were forced to be up 
at sunrise, to study the Church Fathers, to tend the sick and 
console the dying. The Holy Inquisition watched day and 
night that no dangerous doctrines should be spread by way of 
the printing press. Here it is customary to mention poor 



THE INQUISITION 
































256 


THE STORY OE MANKIND 


Galileo, who was locked up because he had been a little too 
indiscreet in explaining the heavens with his funny little tele¬ 
scope and had muttered certain opinions about the behavior 
of the planets which were entirely opposed to the official views 
of the Church. But in all fairness to the pope, the clergy, and 
the Inquisition, it ought to be stated that the Protestants were 
quite as much the enemies of science and medicine as the Cath¬ 
olics and with equal manifestations of ignorance and intoler¬ 
ance regarded the men who investigated things for themselves 
as the most dangerous enemies of mankind. 

And Calvin, the great French reformer and the tyrant 
(both political and spiritual) of Geneva, not only assisted the 
French authorities when they tried to hang Michael Servetus 
(the Spanish theologian and physician who had become famous 
as the assistant of Vesalius, the first great anatomist), but 
when Servetus had managed to escape from his French jail and 
had fled to Geneva, Calvin threw this brilliant man into prison 
and, after a prolonged trial, allowed him to be burned at the 
stake on account of his heresies, totally indifferent to his fame 
as a scientist. 

And so it went. We have few reliable statistics upon the 
subject, but on the whole, the Protestants tired of this game 
long before the Catholics, and the greater part of honest men 
and women who were burned and hanged and decapitated on 
account of their religious beliefs fell as victims of the very ener¬ 
getic but also very drastic church of Rome. 

For tolerance (and please remember this when you grow 
older) is of very recent origin and even the people of our own 
so-called “modern world” are apt to be tolerant only upon such 
matters as do not interest them very much. They are tolerant 
toward a native of Africa, and do not care whether he becomes 
a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, because neither Buddhism nor 
Mohammedanism means anything to them. But when they 
hear that their neighbor, who was a Republican and believed 
in a high protective tariff, has joined the Socialist party and 
now wants to repeal all tariff laws, their tolerance ceases and 
they use almost the same words as those employed by a kindly 


RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


257 


Catholic (or Protestant) of the seventeenth century, who was 
informed that his best friend whom he had always respected 
and loved had fallen a victim to the terrible heresies of the 
Protestant (or Catholic) Church. 

“Heresy” until a very short time ago was regarded as a 
disease. Nowadays when we see a man neglecting the per¬ 
sonal cleanliness of his body and his home and exposing himself 
and his children to the dangers of typhoid fever or another 
preventable disease, we send for the board of health, and the 
health officer calls upon the police to aid him in removing this 
person who is a danger to the safety of the entire community. 
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a heretic, a man 
or a woman who openly doubted the fundamental principles 
upon which his Protestant or Catholic religion had been 
founded, was considered a more terrible menace than a typhoid 
carrier. Typhoid fever might (very likely would) destroy the 
body. But heresy, according to them, would positively destroy 
the immortal soul. It was therefore the duty of all good and 
logical citizens to warn the police against the enemies of the 
established order of things, and those who failed to do so were 
as culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to the 
nearest doctor when he discovers that his fellow-tenants are 
suffering from cholera or smallpox. 

In the years to come you will hear a great deal about pre¬ 
ventive medicine. Preventive medicine simply means that our 
doctors do not wait until their patients are sick, then step for¬ 
ward and cure them. On the contrary, they study the patient 
and the conditions under which he lives when he (the patient) 
is perfectly well, and they remove every possible cause of illness 
by cleaning up rubbish, by teaching him what to eat and what 
to avoid, and by giving him a few simple ideas of personal 
hygiene. They go even further than that, and these good 
doctors enter the schools and teach the children how to use 
toothbrushes and how to avoid catching colds. 

The sixteenth century, which regarded (as I have tried to 
show you) bodily illness as much less important than sickness 
which threatened the soul, organized a system of spiritual pre- 


258 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


ventive medicine. As soon as a child was old enough to spell 
his first words, he was educated in the true (and the “only 
true”) principles of the faith. Indirectly this proved to be a 
good thing for the general progress of the people of Europe. 
The Protestant lands were soon dotted with schools. They 
used a great deal of very valuable time to explain the Cate¬ 
chism, but they gave instruction in other things besides the¬ 
ology. They encouraged reading and they were responsible 
for the great prosperity of the printing trade. 

But the Catholics did not lag behind. They too devoted 
much time and thought to education. The Church, in this mat¬ 
ter, found an invaluable friend and ally in the newly-founded 
order of the Society of Jesus. The founder of this remarkable 
organization was a Spanish soldier who after a life of unholy 
adventures had been converted and thereupon felt himself 
bound to serve the Church, just as many former sinners, who 
have been shown the errors of their ways by the Salvation 
Army, devote the remaining years of their lives to the task of 
aiding and consoling those who are less fortunate. 

The name of this Spaniard was Ignatius de Loyola. He 
was born in the year before the 
been wounded and lamed for life, and while he was in the hos¬ 
pital he had seen a vision of the Holy Virgin and her Son, who 
bade him give up the wickedness of his former life. He de¬ 
cided to go to the Holy Land and finish the task of the Cru¬ 
sades. But a visit to Jerusalem had shown him the impossi¬ 
bility of the task and he returned west to help in the warfare 
upon the heresies of the Lutherans. 

In the year 1534 he was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne. 
Together with seven other students he founded a fraternity. 
The eight men promised each other that they would lead holy 
lives, that they would not strive after riches but after righteous¬ 
ness, and would devote themselves, body and soul, to the serv¬ 
ice of the Church. A few years later this small fraternity 
had grown into a regular organization and was recognized by 
Pope Paul III as the Society of Jesus. 

Loyola had been a military man. He believed in discipline, 


discovery of America. He had 


RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


259 


and absolute obedience to the orders of the superior dignitaries 
became one of the main causes for the enormous success of the 
Jesuits. They specialized in education. They gave their 
teachers a most thoroughgoing education before they allowed 
them to talk to a single pupil. They lived with their students 
and they entered into their games. They watched them with 
tender care. And as a result they raised a new generation of 
faithful Catholics who took their religious duties as seriously 
as the people of the early middle ages. 

The shrewd Jesuits, however, did not waste all their efforts 
upon the education of the poor. They entered the palaces 
of the mighty and became the private tutors of future emperors 
and kings. And what this meant you will see for yourself 
when I tell you about the Thirty Years War. But before 
this terrible and final outbreak of religious fanaticism, a great 
many other things had happened. 

Charles V was dead. Germany and Austria had been left 

•/ 

to his brother Ferdinand. All his other possessions, Spain and 
The Netherlands and the Indies and America, had gone to his 
son Philip. Philip was the son of Charles and a Portuguese 
princess who had been first cousin to her own husband. The 
children that are born of such a union are apt to be rather 
queer. The son of Philip, the unfortunate Don Carlos (mur¬ 
dered afterward with his own father’s consent), was crazy. 
Philip was not quite crazy, but his zeal for the Church bordered 
closely upon religious insanity. He believed that Heaven had 
appointed him as one of the saviors of mankind. Therefore, 
whosoever was obstinate and refused to share His Majesty’s 
views, proclaimed himself an enemy of the human race and 
must be exterminated lest his example corrupt the souls of 
his pious neighbors. 

Spain, of course, was a very rich country. All the gold and 
silver of the new world flowed into the Castilian and Ara- 
gonian treasuries. But Spain suffered from a curious eco¬ 
nomic disease. Her peasants were hard working men and 
even harder working women. But the better classes main¬ 
tained a supreme contempt for any form of labor, outside of 


260 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


employment in the army or navy or the civil service. As for 
the Moors, who had been very industrious artisans, they had 
been driven out of the country long before. As a result, Spain, 
the treasure chest of the world, remained a poor country be¬ 
cause all her money had to be sent abroad in exchange for the 
wheat and the other necessities of life which the Spaniards 
neglected to raise for themselves. 

Philip, ruler of the most powerful nation of the sixteenth 
century, depended for his revenue upon the taxes which were 
gathered in the busy commercial beehive of The Netherlands. 
But these Flemings and Dutchmen were devoted followers of 
doctrines of Luther and Calvin and they had cleansed their 
churches of all images and holy paintings and they had in¬ 
formed the pope that they no longer regarded him as their 
shepherd but intended to follow the dictates of their consciences 
and the commands of their newly translated Bible. 

This placed the king in a very difficult position. He could 
not possibly tolerate the heresies of his Dutch subjects, but 
he needed their money. If he allowed them to be Protestants 
and took no measures to save their souls he was deficient in 
his duty toward God. If he sent the Inquisition to The Neth¬ 
erlands and burned his subjects at the stake, he would lose the 
greater part of his income. 

Being a man of uncertain will-power he hesitated a long 
time. He tried kindness and sternness and promises and 
threats. The Hollanders remained obstinate, and continued to 
sing psalms and listen to the sermons of their Lutheran and 
Calvinist preachers. Philip in his despair sent his “man of 
iron,” the Duke of Alba, to bring these hardened sinners to 
terms. Alba began by decapitating those leaders who had not 
wisely left the country before his arrival. In the year 1572 
he attacked a number of Dutch cities and massacred the in¬ 
habitants as an example for the others. The next year he laid 
siege to the town of Leyden, the manufacturing center of 
Holland. 

Meanwhile, the seven small provinces of the northern 
Netherlands had formed a defensive union, the so-called Union 


RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


261 


ot Utrecht, and had recognized William of Orange, a German 
prince who had been the private secretary of the Emperor 
Charles V, as the leader of their army and as commander of 
their freebooting sailors, who were known as the Beggars of 
the Sea. William, to save Leyden, cut the dykes, created a 
shallow inland sea, and delivered the town with the help of a 
strangely equipped navy consisting of scows and flat-bottomed 



LEYDEN DELIVERED BY THE CUTTING OF THE DYKES 


barges which were rowed and pushed and pulled through the 
mud until they reached the city walls. 

It was the first time that an army of the invincible Spanish 
king had suffered such a humiliating defeat. It surprised the 
world just as the Japanese victory of Mukden, in the Russian- 
Japanese war, surprised our own generation. The Protestant 












262 


THE STORY OE MANKIND 


powers took fresh courage and Philip devised new means for 
the purpose of conquering his rebellious subjects. He hired a 
poor half-witted fanatic to go and murder William of Orange. 
But the sight of their dead leader did not bring the Seven 
Provinces to their knees. On the contrary it made them fur¬ 
iously angry. In the year 1581, the Estates General (the 
meeting of the representatives of the Seven Provinces) came 
together at The Hague and most solemnly abjured their 
“wicked king Philip” and themselves assumed the burden of 
sovereignty which thus far had been invested in their “King 

by the Grace of God.” 

This is a very important 
event in the history of the great 
struggle for political liberty. 
It was a step which reached 
much farther than the uprising 
of the nobles which ended with 
the signing of the Magna Carta. 
These good burghers said, “Be¬ 
tween a king and his subjects 
there is a silent understanding 
that both sides shall perform 
certain services and shall rec¬ 
ognize certain definite duties. 
If either party fails to live up 
to this contract, the other has 
the right to consider it ter¬ 
minated.” The American subjects of King George III in 
the year 1776 came to a similar conclusion. But they had three 
thousand miles of ocean between themselves and their ruler, 
and the Estates General took their decision (which meant a 
slow death in case of defeat) within hearing of the Spanish 
guns and although in constant fear of an avenging Spanish 
fleet. 

The stories about a mysterious Spanish fleet that was to 
conquer both Holland and England, when Protestant Queen 
Elizabeth had succeeded Catholic “Bloody Mary,” was an old 



THE MURDER OF WILLIAM 
THE SILENT 


















RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


263 


one. For years the sailors of the waterfront had talked about 
it. In the ’eighties of the sixteenth century the rumor took a 
definite shape. According to pilots who had been in Lisbon, 
all the Spanish and Portuguese wharves were building ships. 
And in the southern Netherlands (in Belgium) the Duke of 
Parma was collecting a large expeditionary force to be carried 
from Ostend to London and 
Amsterdam as soon as the fleet 
should arrive. 

In the year 1586 the Great 
Armada set sail for the north. 

But the harbors of the Flemish 
coast were blockaded by a 
Dutch fleet and the Channel 
was guarded by the English, 
and the Spaniards, accustomed 
to the quieter seas of the south, 
did not know how to navigate 
in this squally and bleak north¬ 
ern climate. What happened 
to the Armada once it was at¬ 
tacked by ships and by storms 

I need not tell you. A few ships, by sailing around Ireland, 
escaped to tell the terrible story of defeat. The others perished 
and lie at the bottom of the North Sea. 

Turn about is fair play. The British and the Dutch Prot¬ 
estants now carried the war into the territory of the enemy. 
Before the end of the century the route to the Indies had at 
last been discovered. As a result the great Dutch East India 
Company was founded and a systematic war upon the Por¬ 
tuguese and Spanish colonies in Asia and Africa was begun in 
all seriousness. 

It was during this early era of colonial conquest that a 
curious lawsuit was fought out in the Dutch courts. Early in 
the seventeenth century a Dutch captain by the name of van 
Heemskerk, a man who had made himself famous as the head 
of an expedition which had tried to discover the Northeastern 



THE ARMADA IS COMING 













264 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Passage to the Indies and who had spent a winter on the frozen 
shores of the island of Nova Zembla, had captured a Portu¬ 
guese ship in the straits of Malacca. You will remember that 
the pope had divided the world into two equal shares, one of 
which had been given to the Spaniards and the other to the 
Portuguese. The Portuguese quite naturally regarded the 
water which surrounded their Indian islands as part of their 
own property and since, for the moment, they were not at war 
with The United Seven Netherlands, they claimed that the 
captain of a private Dutch trading company had no right to 
enter their private domain and steal their ships. And they 



THE DEATH OF HUDSON 


brought suit. The directors of the Dutch East India Company 
hired a bright young lawyer, by the name of De Groot or 
Grotius, to defend their case. He made the astonishing plea 
that the ocean is free to all comers. Once outside the distance 
which a cannon ball fired from the land can reach, the sea is 
or (according to Grotius) ought to be, a free and open highway 
to all the ships of all nations. It was the first time that this 
startling doctrine had been publicly pronounced in a court 
of law. It was ojjposed by all the other seafaring people. To 
counteract the effect of Grotius’ famous plea for the “Mare 
Liberum,” or “Open Sea,” John Selden, the Englishman, 
wrote his famous treatise upon the “Mare Clausum,” or “Closed 










RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


265 


Sea,” which treated of the natural right of a sovereign to regard 
the seas which surrounded his country as belonging to his terri¬ 
tory. I mention this here because the question had not yet 
been decided and during the last war caused all sorts of diffi¬ 
culties and complications. 

To return to the warfare between Spaniard and Hollander 
and Englishman, before twenty years were over the most valu¬ 
able colonies of the Indies and the Cape of Good Hope and 
Ceylon and those along the coast of China and even Japan were 
in Protestant hands. In 1621 a West Indian Company was 
founded, which conquered Brazil and in North America built 
a fortress called Nieuw Amsterdam at the mouth of the river 
which Henry Hudson had discovered in the year 1609. 

These new r colonies enriched both England and the Dutch 
Republic to such an extent that they could hire foreign sol¬ 
diers to do their fighting on land while they devoted themselves 
to commerce and trade. To them the Protestant revolt meant 
independence and prosperity. But in many other parts of 
Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the 
last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday-school boys. 

The Thirty Years War which broke out in the year 1618 
and which ended with the famous Treaty of Westphalia in 
1648, was the perfectly natural result of a century of ever-in¬ 
creasing religious hatred. It was, as I have said, a terrible war. 
Everybody fought everybody else and the struggle ended only 
when all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and could fight 
no longer. 

In less than a generation it turned many parts of central 
Europe into a wilderness, where the hungry peasants fought 
for the carcass of a dead horse with the even hungrier wolf. 
Five-sixths of all the German towns and villages were de¬ 
stroyed. The Palatinate, in western Germany, was plundered 
twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million 
people was reduced to four million. 

The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of 
the House of Habsburg had been elected emperor. He was 
the product of a most careful Jesuit training and was a most 


266 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


obedient and devout son of the Church. The vow which he had 
made as a young man, that he would eradicate all sects and 
all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best of 
his ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent, 
Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a 
son-in-law of James I of England, had been made king of 
Bohemia, in direct violation of Ferdinand’s wishes. 

At once the Habsburg armies marched into Bohemia. The 
young king looked in vain for assistance against this formi¬ 
dable enemy. The Dutch Republic was willing to help, but, 
engaged in a desperate war of its own with the Spanish branch 
of the Habsburgs, it could do little. The Stuarts in England 
were more interested in strengthening their own absolute power 
at home than in spending money and men upon a forlorn ad¬ 
venture in far away Bohemia. After a struggle of a few 
months, the Elector of the Palatinate was driven away and 
his domains were given to the Catholic House of Bavaria. This 
was the beginning of the great war. 

Then the Habsburg armies, under Tilly and Wallenstein, 
fought their way through the Protestant part of Germany 
until they had reached the shores of the Baltic. A Catholic 
neighbor meant serious danger to the Protestant king of Den¬ 
mark. Christian IV tried to defend himself by attacking his 
enemies before they had become too strong for him. The 
Danish armies marched into Germany but were defeated. 
Wallenstein followed up his victory with such energy and vio¬ 
lence that Denmark was forced to sue for peace. Only one 
town of the Baltic then remained in the hands of the Protes¬ 
tants. That was Stralsund. 

There, in the early summer of the year 1630, landed King 
Gustavus Adolphus of the House of Vasa, king of Sweden, 
and famous as the man who had defended his country against 
the Russians. A Protestant prince of unlimited ambition, 
desirous of making Sweden the center of a great northern 
empire, Gustavus Adolphus was welcomed by the Protestant 
princes of Europe as the savior of the Lutheran cause. He 
defeated Tilly, who had just successfully butchered the Prot- 


€AfCLAVZ> 














A x ' 


mzm 




THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 




























268 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


estant inhabitants of Madgeburg. Then bis troops began their 
great march through the heart of Germany in an attempt to 
reach the Habsburg possessions in Italy. Threatened in the 
rear by the Catholics, Gustavus suddenly veered around and 
defeated the main Habsburg army in the battle of Liitzen. 
Unfortunately the Swedish king was killed when he strayed 
away from his troops. But the Habsburg power had been 
broken. 

Ferdinand, who was a suspicious sort of person, at once 
began to distrust his own servants. Wallenstein, his com¬ 
mander-in-chief, was murdered at his instigation. When the 
Catholic Bourbons, who ruled France and hated their Habs¬ 
burg rivals, heard of this, they joined the Protestant Swedes. 
The armies of Louis XIII invaded the eastern part of Ger¬ 
many, and murdered, pillaged, and burned Habsburg prop¬ 
erty. This brought great fame and riches to the Swedes and 
caused the Danes to become envious. The Protestant Danes 
thereupon declared war upon the Protestant Swedes who were 
the allies of the Catholic French, whose political leader, the 
Cardinal de Richelieu, had just deprived the Huguenots (or 
French Protestants) of those rights of public worship which 
had been guaranteed them. 

The war, after the habit of such encounters, did not decide 
anything, when it came to an end with the treaty of West¬ 
phalia in 1648. The Catholic powers remained Catholic and 
the Protestant powers stayed Protestant. The Swiss and 
Dutch Protestants were recognized as independent republics. 
France kept the cities of Metz and Toul and Verdun and a 
part of Alsace. The Holy Roman Empire continued to exist 
as a sort of scarecrow state, without men, without money, with¬ 
out hope, and without courage. 

The only good the Thirty Years War accomplished was a 
negative one. It discouraged both Catholics and Protestants 
from ever trying it again. Henceforth they left each other in 
peace. This, however, did not mean that religious feeling and 
theological hatred had been removed from this earth. On the 
contrary. The quarrels between Catholic and Protestant came 


RELIGIOUS WARFARE 


269 


to an end, but the disputes between the different Protestant 
sects continued as bitterly as ever before. In Holland a dif¬ 
ference of opinion as to the true nature of predestination (a 
very obscure point of theology, but exceedingly important in 
the eyes of your great-grandfather) caused a quarrel which 
ended with the decapitation of John of Oldenbarneveldt, the 
Dutch statesman who had been responsible for the success of 
the Republic during the first twenty years of its independence, 
and who was the great organizing genius of her Indian trading 
company. In England, the feud led to civil war. 



AMSTERDAM IN 1648 


But before I tell you of this outbreak, which led to the first 
execution by process-of-law of a European king, I ought to 
say something about the previous history of England. In this 
book I am trying to give you only those events of the past 
which can throw a light upon the conditions of the present 
world. If I do not mention certain countries, the cause is not 
to be found in any secret dislike on my part. I wish that I 
could tell you what happened to Norway and Switzerland and 
Serbia and China. But these lands exercised no great influ¬ 
ence upon the development of Europe in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. I therefore pass them by with a polite 
and very respectful bow. England, however, is in a different 















270 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


position. What the people of that small island have done dur¬ 
ing the last five hundred years has shaped the course of history 
in every corner of the world. Without a proper knowledge of 
the background of English history, you cannot understand 
what you read in the newspapers. And it is therefore necessary 
that you know how England happened to develop a parliamen¬ 
tary form of government while the rest of the European conti¬ 
nent was still ruled by absolute monarchs. 


THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


CiESAR, the earliest explorer of northwestern Europe, had 
crossed the Channel in the year 55 b.c. and had conquered 
England. During four centuries the country then remained 
a Roman province. But when the barbarians began to threaten 
Rome, the garrisons were called back from the frontier that 
they might defend the home country, and Britannia was left 
without a government and without protection. 

As soon as this became known among the hungry Saxon 
tribes of northern Germany, they sailed across the North Sea 
and made themselves at home in the prosperous island. They 
founded a number of independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (so 
called after the original invaders, the Angles or English and 
the Saxons), but these small states were forever quarreling 
with each other and no king was strong enough to establish 
himself as the head of a united country. For more than five 
hundred years, Mercia and Northumbria and Wessex and 
Sussex and Kent and East Anglia, or whatever their names, 
were exposed to attacks from various Scandinavian pirates. 
Finally in the eleventh century England, together with Nor¬ 
way and northern Germany, became part of the large Danish 
empire of Canute the Great and the last vestiges of independ¬ 
ence disappeared. 

The Danes in the course of time were driven away, but no 
sooner was England free than it was conquered for the fourth 
time. The new enemies were the descendants of another tribe 


271 







272 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of N orsemen who early in the tenth century had invaded 
France and had founded the duchy of Normandy. William, 
Duke of Normandy, who for a long time had looked across the 
water with an envious eye, crossed the Channel in October 
of the year 1066. At the battle of Hastings, on October the 
fourteenth of that year, he destroyed the weak forces of Harold 
of Wessex, the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, and established 



THE ENGLISH NATION 


himself as king of England. But neither William nor his 
successors of the House of Anjou and Plantagenet regarded 
England as their true home. To them the island was merely a 
part of their great inheritance on the continent—a sort of 
colony inhabited by rather backward people upon whom they 
forced their own language and civilization. Gradually, how¬ 
ever, the “colony” of England gained upon the “mother coun¬ 
try” of Normandy. At the same time the kings of France 









THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


273 



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THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 

English soldiers, was burned as a witch. But the English 
never gained foothold upon the continent, and their kings were 
at last able to devote all their time to their British possessions. 
As the feudal nobility of the island had been engaged in one of 
those strange feuds which were as common in the middle ages 
as measles and smallpox, and as the greater part of the old 


were trying desperately to get rid of the powerful Norman- 
English neighbors who were in truth no more than disobedient 
servants of the French crown. After a century of warfare 
the French people, under the leadership of a young girl by 
the name of Joan of Arc, drove the “foreigners” from their 
soil. Joan herself, taken a prisoner at the battle of Compiegne 
in the year 1430 and sold by her Burgundian captors to the 


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Av/lCMOfo 


Gv'EaJa/e 




vonsw 













274 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


landed proprietors had been killed during these so-called Wars 
of the Roses, it was quite easy for the kings to increase their 
royal power. And by the end of the fifteenth century Eng¬ 
land was a strongly centralized country, ruled by Henry VII 
of the House of Tudor, whose famous Court of Justice, the 
“Star Chamber” of terrible memory, suppressed with the ut¬ 
most severity all attempts on the part of the surviving nobles 
to regain their old influence upon the government of the 
country. 

In the year 1509 Henry VII was succeeded by his son 
Henry VIII, and from that moment on the history of Eng¬ 
land gained a new importance, for the country ceased to be a 
medieval island and became a modern state. 

Henry had no deep interest in religion. He gladly used a 
private disagreement with the pope about one of his many 
divorces to declare himself independent of Rome and make the 
Church of England the first of those “nationalistic churches” 
in which the worldly ruler also acts as the spiritual head of his 
subjects. This peaceful reformation of 1534 not only gave 
the House of Tudor the support of the English clergy, who 
for a long time had been exposed to the violent attacks of many 
Lutheran propagandists, but it also increased the royal power 
through the confiscation of the former possessions of the mon¬ 
asteries. At the same time it made Henry popular with the 
merchants and tradespeople, w r ho as the proud and prosperous 
inhabitants of an island which was separated from the rest of 
Europe by a wide and deep channel, had a great dislike for 
everything “foreign” and did not want an Italian bishop to rule 
their honest British souls. 

In 1547 Henry died. He left the throne to his small son, 
aged ten. The guardians of the child, favoring the modern 
Lutheran doctrines, did their best to help the cause of Protes¬ 
tantism. But the boy died before he was sixteen, and was suc¬ 
ceeded by his sister Mary, the wife of Philip II of Spain, who 
burned the bishops of the new “national church” and in other 
ways followed the example of her royal Spanish husband. 

Fortunately she died, in the year 1558, and was succeeded 


THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


275 


by Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, 
the second of his six wives, whom he had decapitated when she 
no longer pleased him. Elizabeth, who had spent some time in 
prison, and who had been released only at the request of the 
Holy Roman Emperor, was a most cordial enemy of every¬ 
thing Catholic and Spanish. She shared her father’s indiffer¬ 
ence in the matter of religion, but she inherited his ability as a 
very shrewd judge of character, and spent the forty-five years 
of her reign in strengthening the power of the dynasty and in 
increasing the revenue and possessions of her merry islands. 
In this she was most ably assisted by a number of men who 
gathered around her throne and made the Elizabethan age a 
period of such importance that you ought to study it in detail 
in one of the special books of which I shall tell you in the bibli¬ 
ography at the end of this volume. 

Elizabeth, however, did not feel entirely safe upon her 
throne. She had a rival, and a very dangerous one. Mary, 
of the House of Stuart, daughter of a French duchess and a 
Scottish father, widow of King Francis II of France and 
daughter-in-law of Catherine of Medici (who had organized 
the murders of Saint Bartholomew’s night), was the mother of 
a little boy who was afterward to become the first Stuart king 
of England. She was an ardent Catholic and a willing friend 
to those who were the enemies of Elizabeth. Her own lack 
of political ability and the violent methods which she employed 
to punish her Calvinistic subjects caused a revolution in Scot¬ 
land and forced Mary to take refuge on English territory. For 
eighteen years she remained in England, plotting forever and 
a day against the woman who had given her shelter and who 
was at last obliged to follow the advice of her trusted coun¬ 
cillors “to cutte off the Scottish Queen’s heade.” 

The head was duly “cutte off” in the year 1587 and caused 
a war with Spain. But the combined navies of England and 
Holland defeated Philip’s invincible Armada, as we have al¬ 
ready seen, and the blow which had been meant to destroy the 
power of the two great anti-Catholic leaders was turned into a 
profitable business adventure. 


276 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


For now at last, after many years of hesitation, the Eng¬ 
lish as well as the Dutch thought it their good right to invade 
the Indies and America and avenge the ills which their Protes¬ 
tant brethren had suffered at the hands of the Spaniards. The 
English had been among the earliest successors of Columbus. 
British ships, commanded by the Venetian pilot Giovanni Ca- 
boto (or Cabot), had been the first to discover and explore the 
northern American continent in 1496. Labrador and New¬ 
foundland were of little importance as a possible colony. But 
the banks of Newfoundland offered a rich reward to the Eng- 



JOHN AND SEBASTIAN CABOT SEE THE COAST OF NEWFOUNDLAND 


lish fishing fleet. A year later, in 1497, the same Cabot had 
explored the coast of Florida. 

Then had come the busy years of Henry VII and Henry 
VIII when there had been no money for foreign explorations. 
But under Elizabeth, with the country at peace and Mary 
Stuart in prison, the sailors could leave their harbor without 
fear for the fate of those whom they left behind. While Eliza¬ 
beth was still a child, Willoughby had ventured to sail past the 
North Cape and one of his captains, Richard Chancellor, push¬ 
ing farther eastward in his quest of a possible road to the In- 



THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


277 


dies, had reached Archangel, Russia, where he had established 
diplomatic and commercial relations with the mysterious rulers 
of this distant Muscovite empire. During the first years of 
Elizabeth’s rule this voyage had been followed up by many 
others. Merchant adventurers, working for the benefit of a 
“joint stock company,” had laid the foundations of trading 
companies which in later centuries were to become colonies. 
Half pirate, half diplomat, willing to stake everything on a 
single lucky voyage, smugglers of everything that could be 
loaded into the hold of a vessel, dealers in men and merchandise 
with equal indifference to everything except their profit, the 
sailors of Elizabeth had carried the English flag and the fame 
of their virgin queen to the four corners of the seven seas. 
Meanwhile William Shakespeare kept her Majesty amused at 
home, and the best brains and the best wit of England coop¬ 
erated with the queen in her attempt to change the feudal in¬ 
heritance of Henry VIII into a modern national state. 

In the year 1603 the old lady died at the age of seventy. 
Her cousin, the great-grandson of her own grandfather, Henry 
VII, and son of Mary Stuart, her rival and enemy, succeeded 
her as James I. By the Grace of God, he found himself the 
ruler of a country which had escaped the fate of its continental 
rivals. While the European Protestants and Catholics were 
killing each other in a hopeless attempt to break the power of 
their adversaries and establish the exclusive rule of their own 
particular creed, England was at peace and “reformed” at 
leisure without going to the extremes of either Luther or 
Loyola. It gave the island kingdom an enormous advantage in 
the coming struggle for colonial possessions. It assured Eng¬ 
land a leadership in international affairs which that country 
has maintained until the present day. Not even the disastrous 
adventure with the Stuarts was able to stop this normal de¬ 
velopment. 

The Stuarts, who succeeded the Tudors, were “foreigners” 
in England. They do not seem to have appreciated or under¬ 
stood this fact. The native House of Tudor could steal a horse, 
but the “foreign” Stuarts were not allowed to look at the 


278 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


bridle without causing great popular disapproval. Old Queen 
Bess had ruled her domains very much as she pleased. In 
general, however, she had always followed a policy which meant 
money in the pockets of the honest (and otherwise) British mer¬ 
chants. Hence the queen had always been assured of the 
wholehearted support of her grateful people. And small lib¬ 
erties taken with some of the rights and prerogatives of Parlia¬ 
ment were gladly overlooked for the ulterior benefits which 
were derived from her Majesty’s strong and successful foreign 
policies. 



THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE 


Outwardly King James continued the same policy. But he 
lacked that personal enthusiasm which had been so very typical 
of his great predecessor. Foreign commerce continued to be 
encouraged. The Catholics were not granted any liberties. 
But when Spain smiled pleasantly upon England in an effort 
to establish peaceful relations, James was seen to smile back. 
The majority of the English people did not like this, but 
James was their king and they kept quiet. 







































THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


279 


Soon there were other causes of friction. King James and 
his son, Charles I, who succeeded him in the year 1625, both 
firmly believed in the principle of their “divine right” to ad¬ 
minister their realm as they thought fit without consulting the 
wishes of their subjects. The idea was not new. The popes, 
who in more than one way had been the successors of the 
Roman emperors (or rather of the Roman imperial ideal of 
a single and undivided state covering the entire known world), 
had always regarded themselves and had been publicly rec¬ 
ognized as the “vice-regents of Christ upon Earth.” No one 
questioned the right of God to rule the world as He saw fit. 
As a natural result, few ventured to doubt the right of the 
divine “vice-regent” to do the same thing and to demand the 
obedience of the masses, because he was the direct representa¬ 
tive of the Absolute Ruler of the Universe and responsible 
only to Almighty God. 

When the Lutheran Reformation proved successful, those 
rights which formerly had been vested in the papacy were 
taken over by the many European sovereigns who became 
Protestants. As head of their own national or dynastic 
churches they insisted upon being “Christ’s vice-regents” with¬ 
in the limits of their own territory. The people did not question 
the right of their rulers to take such a step. They accepted it, 
just as we in our own day accept the idea of a representative 
system which to us seems the only reasonable and just form 
of government. It is unfair, therefore, to state that either 
Lutheranism or Calvinism caused the particular feeling of irri¬ 
tation which greeted King James’s oft and loudly repeated 
assertion of his “divine right.” There must have been other 
grounds for the genuine English disbelief in the divine right 
of kings. 

The first positive denial of the “divine right” of sovereigns 
had been heard in The Netherlands when the Estates General 
abjured their lawful sovereign King Philip II of Spain in the 
year 1581. “The king,” so they said, “has broken his contract 
and the king therefore is dismissed like any other unfaithful 
servant.” Since then, this particular idea of a king’s respon- 


280 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


sibilities toward his subjects had spread among many of the 
nations who inhabited the shores of the North Sea. They were 
in a very favorable position. They were rich. The poor peo¬ 
ple in the heart of central Europe, at the mercy of their 
ruler’s bodyguard, could not afford to discuss a problem which 
would at once land them in the deepest dungeon of the nearest 
castle. But the merchants of Holland and England, who 
possessed the capital necessary for the maintenance of great 
armies and navies and who knew how to handle the almighty 
weapon called “credit,” had no such fear. They were willing 
to pit the “divine right” of their own good money against 
the “divine right” of any Hahsburg or Bourbon or Stuart. 
They knew that their guilders and shillings could beat the 
clumsy feudal armies which were the only weapons of the king. 
They dared to act, where others were condemned to suffer 
in silence or run the risk of the scaffold. 

When the Stuarts began to annoy the people of England 
with their claim that they had a right to do jvhat they pleased 
and pay no attention to the responsibility, the English middle 
classes used the House of Commons as their first line of de¬ 
fense against this abuse of the royal power. The Crown re¬ 
fused to give in and the king sent Parliament about its own 
business. Eleven long years Charles I ruled alone. He levied 
taxes which most people regarded as illegal, and he'managed 
his British kingdom as if it had been his own country estate. 
He had capable assistants, and we must say that he had the 
courage of his convictions. 

Unfortunately, instead of assuring himself of the support 
of his faithful Scottish subjects, Charles became involved in 
a quarrel with the Scotch Presbyterians. Much against his 
will, but forced by his need for ready cash, Charles was at 
last obliged to call Parliament together once more. It met in 
April of 1640 and showed an ugly temper. It was dissolved 
a few weeks later. A new Parliament convened in November. 
This one was even less pliable than the first one. The mem¬ 
bers understood that the question of “government by divine 
right or government by Parliament” must be fought out 


THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


281 


for good and all. They attacked the king through his chief 
councillors and executed half a dozen of them. They an¬ 
nounced that they would not allow themselves to be dissolved 
without their own approval. Finally on December 1 , 1641, 
they presented to the king a "grand remonstrance” which gave 
a detailed account of the many grievances of the people. 

Charles, hoping to derive some support for his own policy 
in the country districts, left London in January of 1642. Each 
side organized an army and prepared for open warfare be¬ 
tween the absolute power of the crown and the absolute power 
of Parliament. During this struggle, the most powerful relig¬ 
ious element of England, called the Puritans (they were 
Anglicans who had tried to purify their doctrines to the most 
absolute limits), came quickly to the front. The regiments of 
“Godly men,” commanded by Oliver Cromwell, with their 
iron discipline and their profound confidence in the holiness of 
their aims, soon became the model for the entire armv of the 
opposition. Twice Charles was defeated. After the battle 
of Naseby, in 1645, he fled to Scotland. The Scotch sold him 
to the English. 

There followed a period of intrigue and an uprising of 
the Scotch Presbyterians against the English Puritans. In 
August of the year 1648, after the three-day battle of Preston 
Pans, Cromwell made an end to this second civil war and 
took Edinburgh. Meanwhile his soldiers, tired of further talk 
and wasted hours of religions debate, had decided to act on 
their own initiative. They removed from Parliament all those 
who did not agree with their own Puritan views. Thereupon 
the “Rump,” which was what was left of the old Parliament, 
accused the king of high treason. The House of Lords re¬ 
fused to sit as a tribunal. A special tribunal was appointed 
and it condemned the king to death. On the 80th of January 
of the year 1649, King Charles walked quietly out of a win¬ 
dow of White Hall onto the scaffold. That day, the Sovereign 
People, acting through their chosen representatives, for the 
first time executed a ruler who had failed to understand his own 
position in the modern state. 


282 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


The period which followed the death of Charles is usually 
called after Oliver Cromwell. At first the unofficial Dictator 
of England, he w r as officially made Lord Protector in the year 
1653. He ruled five years. He used this period to continue 
the policies of Elizabeth. Spain once more became the arch¬ 
enemy of England and war upon the Spaniard was made a 
national and sacred issue. 

The commerce of England and the interests of the traders 
were placed before everything else, and the Protestant creed of 
the strictest nature was rigorously maintained. In maintaining 
England’s position abroad, Cromwell was successful. As a 
social reformer, however, he failed very badly. The world is 
made up of a number of people and they rarely think alike. 
In the long run, this seems a very wise provision. A govern¬ 
ment of and by and for one single part of the entire community 
cannot possibly survive. The Puritans had been a great force 
for good when they tried to correct the abuse of the royal 
power. As the absolute rulers of England they became in¬ 
tolerable. 

When Cromwell died in 1658, it was an easy matter for the 
Stuarts to return to their old kingdom. Indeed, they were 
welcomed as “deliverers” by the people, who had found the 
yoke of the meek Puritans quite as hard to bear as that of auto¬ 
cratic King Charles. Provided the Stuarts were willing to for¬ 
get about the divine right of their late and lamented father 
and were willing to recognize the superiority of Parliament, the 
people promised that they would be loyal and faithful subjects. 

Two generations tried to make a success of this new ar¬ 
rangement. But the Stuarts apparently had not learned their 
lesson and were unable to drop their bad habits. Charles II, 
who came back in the year 1660, was an amiable but worthless 
person. His indolence and his constitutional insistence upon 
following the easiest course, together with his conspicuous suc¬ 
cess as a liar, prevented an open outbreak between himself and 
his people. By the Act of Uniformity in 1662 he broke the 
power of the Puritan clergy by banishing all dissenting clergy¬ 
men from their parishes. By the so-called Conventicle Act of 


THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


283 


1664 lie tried to prevent the Dissenters from attending religious 
meetings by a threat of deportation to the West Indies. This 
looked too much like the good old days of divine right. Peo¬ 
ple began to show the old and well-known signs of impatience, 
and Parliament suddenly experienced difficulty in providing 
the king with funds. 

Since he could not get money from an unwilling Parlia¬ 
ment, Charles borrowed it secretly from his neighbor and cousin, 
King Louis of France. He betrayed his Protestant allies in 
return for 200,000 pounds per year, and laughed at the poor 
simpletons of Parliament. 

Economic independence suddenly gave the king great faith 
in his own strength. He had spent many years of exile among 
his Catholic relatives, and he had a secret liking for their reli¬ 
gion. Perhaps he could bring England back to Rome! He 
passed a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended the old 
laws against the Catholics and Dissenters. This happened just 
when Charles’ younger brother James was said to have become 
a Catholic. All this looked suspicious to the man in the street. 
People began to fear some terrible popish plot. A new spirit 
of unrest entered the land. Most of the people wanted to pre¬ 
vent another outbreak of civil war. To them royal oppres¬ 
sion and a Catholic king—yea, even divine right—were 
preferable to a new struggle between members of the same 
race. Others, however, were less lenient. They were the much 
feared Dissenters, who invariably had the courage of their con¬ 
victions. They were led by several great noblemen who did 
not want to see a return of the old days of absolute royal 
power. 

For almost ten years, these two great parties, the Whigs 
(the middle class element, called by this derisive name be¬ 
cause in the year 1640 a lot of Scottish Whiggamores or horse- 
drovers, headed by the Presbyterian clergy, had marched to 
Edinburgh to oppose the king) and the Tories (an epithet 
originally used against the Royalist Irish adherents but now 
applied to the supporters of the king) opposed each other, but 
neither wished to bring about a crisis. They allowed Charles to 




1284 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


die peacefully in his bed and permitted the Catholic James II 
to succeed his brother in 168.5. But when Janies, after threaten¬ 
ing the country with the terrible foreign invention of a “stand¬ 
ing army” (which was to be commanded by Catholic French¬ 
men), issued a second Declaration of Indulgence in 1688, and 
ordered it to he read in all Anglican churches, he went just a 
trifle beyond that line of sensible demarcation which can only be 
transgressed by the most popular of rulers under very ex¬ 
ceptional circumstances. Seven bishops refused to comply 
with the roval command. They were accused of “seditious 
libel.” They were brought before a court. The jury which 
pronounced the verdict of “not guilty” reaped a rich harvest 
of popular approval. 

At this unfortunate moment, James (who in a second mar¬ 
riage had taken to wife the Catholic Maria) became the father 
of a son. This meant that the throne was to go to a Catholic 
hoy rather than to his older sisters, Mary and Anne, who were 
Protestants. The man in the street again grew suspicious. 
Maria was too old to have children! It was all part of a plot! 
A strange habj r had been brought into the palace by some Jesuit 
priest that England might have a Catholic monarch. And so 
on. It looked as if another civil war would break out. Then 
seven well-known men, Whigs and Tories, wrote a letter ask¬ 
ing the husband of James’s oldest daughter Mary, William III, 
head of the Dutch Republic, to come to England and deliver 
the country from its lawful but entirely undesirable sovereign. 

On the fifth of November of the year 1688, William landed 
at Torbay. As he did not wish to make a martyr out of his 
father-in-law, he helped him to escape safely to France. On 
the 22nd of January of 1689 he summoned Parliament. On 
the 13th of February of the same year he and his wife Marv 


were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England and the country 
was saved for the Protestant cause. 

Parliament, having undertaken to he something more than 
a mere advisory body to the king, made the best of its oppor¬ 
tunities. The old Petition of Rights of the year 1628 was 
fished out of a forgotten nook of the archives. A second and 


THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 


285 


more drastic Bill of Rights demanded that the sovereign of 
England should belong to the Anglican Church. Furthermore 
it stated that the king had no right to suspend the laws or 
permit certain privileged citizens to disobey certain laws. It 
stipulated that “without consent of Parliament no taxes could 
be levied and no army could he maintained.” Thus in the year 
1089 did England acquire an amount of liberty unknown in 
any other country of Europe. 

But it is not only on account of this great liberal measure 
that the rule of William of England is still remembered. Dur¬ 
ing his lifetime, government by a “responsible” ministry first 
developed. No king of course can rule alone. He needs a few 
trusted advisers. The Tudors had their Great Council which 
was composed of nobles and clergy. This body grew too 
large. It was restricted to the small “Privy Council.” In the 
course of time it became the custom of these councillors to meet 
the king in a cabinet in the palace. Hence they were called 
the “Cabinet Council.” After a short while they were known 
as the “Cabinet.” 

William, like most English sovereigns before him, had 
chosen his advisers from among all parties. But with the in¬ 
creased strength of Parliament he had found it impossible to 
direct the politics of the country with the help of the Tories 
while the Whigs had a majority in the House of Commons. 
Therefore the Tories had been dismissed and the Cabinet Coun¬ 
cil had been composed entirely of Whigs. A few years later, 
when the Whigs lost their power in the House of Commons, the 
king, for the sake of convenience, was obliged to look for his 
support among the leading Tories. Until his death in 1702, 
William was too busy fighting Louis of France to bother much 
about the government of England. Practically all important 
affairs had been left to his Cabinet Council. When William’s 
sister-in-law, Anne, succeeded him in 1702 this condition of 
affairs continued. When she died in 1714 (and unfortunately 
not a single one of her seventeen children survived her) the 
throne went to George I of the House of Hanover, the son of 
Sophie, granddaughter of James T. 


286 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


This somewhat rustic monarch, who never learned a word 
of English, was entirely lost in the complicated mazes of Eng¬ 
land’s political arrangements. He left everything to his Cabi¬ 
net Council and kept away from their meetings, which bored 
him as he did not understand a single sentence. In this way 
the Cabinet got into the habit of ruling England and Scot¬ 
land (whose Parliament had been joined to that of England 
in 1707) without bothering the king, who was likely to spend 
a great deal of his time on the continent. 

During the reigns of George I and George II, a succession 
of great Whigs (of whom one, Sir Robert Walpole, held 
office for twenty-one years) formed the Cabinet Council of the 
king. Their leader was finally recognized as the official leader 
not only of the actual Cabinet but also of the majority party in 
power in Parliament. The attempts of George III to take 
matters into his own hands and not to leave the actual busi¬ 
ness of the government to his Cabinet was so disastrous that 
they were never repeated. Thus from the earliest years of the 
eighteenth century on, England enjoyed representative govern¬ 
ment, with a responsible ministry which conducted the affairs 
of the land. 

To be sure, this government did not represent all classes 
of society. Less than one man in a dozen had the right to 
vote. But it was the foundation for the modern representa¬ 
tive form of government. In a quiet and orderly fashion it 
took the power away from the king and placed it in the hands 
of an ever-increasing number of popular representatives. It 
did not bring the millennium to England, but it saved that 
country from most of the revolutionary outbreaks which proved 
so disastrous to the European continent in the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries. 


THE BALANCE OF POWER 


As a contrast to the previous chapter, let me tell you what 
happened in France during the years when the English peo¬ 
ple were fighting for their liberty. The happy combination 
of the right man in the right country at the right moment is 
very rare in history. Louis XIV was a realization of this ideal, 
as far as France was concerned, but the rest of Europe would 
have been happier without him. 

The country over which the young king was called to rule 
was the most populous and the most brilliant nation of that 
day. Louis came to the throne when Mazarin and Richelieu, 
the two great cardinals, had j ust hammered the ancient French 
kingdom into the most strongly centralized state of the seven¬ 
teenth century. He was himself a man of extraordinary abil¬ 
ity. We, the people of the twentieth century, are still sur¬ 
rounded by the memories of the glorious age of the Sun King. 
Our social life is based upon the perfection of manners and the 
elegance of expression attained at the court of Louis. In in¬ 
ternational and diplomatic relations, French is still the official 
language of diplomacy and international gatherings, because 
two centuries ago it reached a polished elegance and a purity 
of expression which no other tongue had as yet been able to 
equal. The theater of King Louis still teaches us lessons 
which we are only too slow in learning. During his reign the 
French Academy (an invention of Richelieu) came to occupy 
a position in the world of letters which other countries have 


287 







288 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


flattered by their imitation. We might continue this list for 
many pages. It is no matter of mere chance that our modern 
bill-of-fare is printed in French. The very difficult art of 
decent cooking, one of the highest expressions of civilization, 
was first practiced for the benefit of the great monarch. The 
age of Louis XIV was a time of splendor and grace which can 
still teach us a lot. 

Unfortunately this brilliant picture has another side which 
is far less attractive. Glory abroad too often means misery at 
home, and France was no exception to this rule. Louis XIV 
succeeded his father in the year 1643. He died in the year 
1715. That means that the government of France was in the 
hands of one single man for seventy-two years, almost two 
whole generations. 

It will be well to get a firm grasp of this idea, ‘'one single 
man.” Louis was the first of a long list of monarchs who in 
many countries established that particular form of highly effi¬ 
cient autocracy which we call “enlightened despotism.” He 
did not like kings who merely played at being rulers and 
turned official affairs into a pleasant picnic. The kings of 
that enlightened age worked harder than any of their sub¬ 
jects. They got up earlier and went to bed later than anybody 
else, and felt their “divine responsibility” quite as strongly as 
their “divine right” which allowed them to rule without consult¬ 
ing their subjects. 

Of course, the king could not attend to everything in per¬ 
son. He was obliged to surround himself with a few helpers 
and councillors. One or two generals, some experts upon for¬ 
eign politics, a few clever financiers and economists would do 
for this purpose. But these dignitaries could act only through 
their sovereign. They had no individual existence. To the 
mass of the people, the sovereign actually represented in his 
own sacred person the government of their country. The 
glory of the common fatherland became the glory of a single 
dynasty. It meant the exact opposite of our own American 
ideal. France was ruled of and by and for the House of Bour¬ 
bon. 


THE BALANCE OF POWER 


289 


The disadvantages of such a system are clear. The king 
grew to he everything. Everybody else grew to he nothing at 
all. The old and useful nobility was gradually forced to give 
up its former shares in the government of the provinces. A lit¬ 
tle royal bureaucrat, his fingers splashed with ink, sitting be¬ 
hind the greenish windows of a government building in far¬ 
away Paris, now performed the task which a hundred years 
before had been the duty of the feudal lord. The feudal lord, 
deprived of all work, moved to Paris to amuse himself as best 
he could at the court. Soon his estates began to suffer from 



THE BALANCE OF POWER 


that very dangerous economic sickness known as ‘‘absentee 
landlordism.” Within a single generation, the industrious and 
useful feudal administrators had become the well-mannered but 
quite useless loafers of the court of Versailles. 

Louis was ten years old when the peace of Westphalia was 
concluded and the House of Habsburg, as a result ol the 
Thirty Years War, lost its predominant position in Europe. 
















290 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


It was inevitable that a man with his ambition should use so 
favorable a moment to gain for his own dynasty the honors 
which had formerly been held by the Habsburgs. In the year 
1660 Louis had married Maria Theresa, daughter of the king 
of Spain. Soon afterward, his father-in-law, Philip IV, one 
of the half-witted Spanish Habsburgs, died. At once Louis 
claimed The Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) as part of his 
wife’s dowry. Such an acquisition would have been disastrous 
to the peace of Europe, and would have threatened the safety 
of the Protestant states. Under the leadership of Jan de Witt, 
Foreign Minister of The Netherlands, the first great inter¬ 
national alliance, the Triple Alliance of Sweden, England, and 
Holland, of the year 1664, was concluded. It did not last long. 
With money and fair promises Louis bought up both King 
Charles and the Swedish Estates. Holland was betrayed by 
her allies and was left to her own fate. In the vear 1672 the 
French invaded the low countries. They marched to the heart 
of the country. For a second time the dikes were opened and 

the Roval Sun of France set amidst the mud of the Dutch 
•/ 

marshes. The Peace of Nimwegen which was concluded in 1678 
settled nothing, but merely anticipated another war. 

A second war of aggression from 1689 to 1697 also failed 
to give Louis that position in the affairs of Europe to which he 
aspired. His old enemy, Jan de Witt, had been murdered by 
the Dutch rabble, but his successor, William III (whom you 
met in the last chapter), had checkmated all efforts of Louis 
to make France the ruler of Europe. 

The great war for the Spanish succession, begun in the 
year 1701 immediately after the death of Charles II, the last 
of the Spanish Habsburgs, and ended in 1718 by the Peace 
of Utrecht, remained equally undecided, but it had ruined the 
treasury of Louis. On land the French king had been victor¬ 
ious, but the navies of England and Holland had spoiled all 
hope for an ultimate French victory. The long struggle had 
given birth to a new and fundamental principle of interna¬ 
tional politics, which thereafter made it impossible for one 
single nation to rule the whole of Europe or the whole of the 


THE BALANCE OF POWER 


291 


.world for any length of time. That was the so-called “balance 
of power.” It was not a written law, but for three centuries 
it has been obeyed as closely as are the laws of nature. The 
people who originated the idea maintained that Europe, in its 
nationalistic stage of development, could only survive when 
there should be an absolute balance of the many conflicting 
interests of the entire continent. No single power or single 
dynasty must ever be allowed to dominate the others. During 
(the Thirty Years War, the Habsburgs had been the victims 
of the application of this law. They, however, had been un¬ 
conscious victims. The issues during that struggle were so 
clouded in a haze of religious strife that we do not get a very 
clear view of the main tendencies of that great conflict. But 
from that time on, we begin to see how cold, economic con¬ 
siderations and calculations prevail in all matters of interna¬ 
tional importance. We discover the development of a new type 
of statesman, the statesman with the personal feelings of the 
slide-rule and the cash register. Jan de Witt was the first suc¬ 
cessful exponent of this new school of politics. William III 
was the first great pupil. And Louis XIV, with all his fame 
and glory, was the first conscious victim. There have been 
many others since. 


THE RISE OF RUSSIA 


In the year 1492, as you know, Columbus discovered Amer- 
ica. Early in the year a Tyrolese by the name of Schnups, 
traveling as the head of a scientific expedition for the 
Archbishop of Tyrol and provided with the best letters of 
introduction and excellent credit, tried to reach the mythical 
town of Moscow. He did not succeed. When he reached the 
frontiers of tills vast Moscovite state which was vaguely sup¬ 
posed to exist in the extreme eastern part of Europe, he was 
firmly turned back. No foreigners were wanted. And 
Schnups went to visit the heathen Turk in Constantinople, in 
order that he might have something to report to his clerical 
master when he came back from his explorations. 

Sixty-one years later, Richard Chancellor, trying to dis¬ 
cover the Northeastern Passage to the Indies and blown by 
an ill wind into the White Sea, reached the mouth of the Dvina 
and found the Moscovite village of Kholmogory, a few hours 
from the spot where in 1584 the town of Archangel was found¬ 
ed. This time the foreign visitors were requested to come 
to Moscow and show themselves to the Grand Duke. They 
went and returned to England with the first commercial treaty 
ever concluded between Russia and the western world. Other 
nations soon followed and something became known of this 
mysterious land. 

Geographically, Russia is a vast plain. The Ural moun¬ 
tains are low and form no barrier against invaders. The 


292 







THE RISE OF RUSSIA 


293 



nomads. 

While the Roman Empire was founded, grew in power, and 
disappeared again, Slavic tribes who had long since left their 
homes in Central Asia wandered aimlessly through the forests 
and plains of the region between the Dniester and Dnieper 
rivers. The Greeks had sometimes met these Slavs and a few 
travelers of the third and fourth centuries mention them. 
Otherwise they were as little known as were the Nevada In¬ 
dians in the year 1800. 

Unfortunately for the peace of these primitive peoples, a 
very convenient trade-route ran through their country. This 
was the main road from northern Europe to Constantinople. 
It followed the coast of the Baltic until the Neva was reached. 
Then it crossed Lake Ladoga and went southward along the 
Volkhov River; then through Lake Ilmen and up the small 
Lovat River; then there was a short portage until the Dnieper 
was reached; then down the Dnieper into the Black Sea. 

The Norsemen knew of this road at a very early date. In 
the ninth century they began to settle in northern Russia, just 
as other Norsemen were laying the foundation for independent 
states in Germany and France. But in the year 862, three 
Norsemen, brothers, crossed the Baltic and founded three small 
dynasties. Of the three brothers, only one, Rurik, lived for a 
number of years. He took possession of the territory of his 
brothers, and twenty years after the arrival of this first Norse¬ 
man a Slavic state had been established with Kiev as its 
capital. 

From Kiev to the Black Sea is a short distance. Soon the 
existence of an organized Slavic state became known in Con¬ 
stantinople. This meant a new field for the zealous mission¬ 
aries of the Christian faith. Byzantine monks followed the 
Dnieper on their way northward and soon reached the heart of 
Russia. They found the people worshipping strange gods 
who were supposed to dwell in woods and rivers and in moun¬ 
tain caves. They taught them the story of Jesus. There was 
no competition from the side of Roman missionaries. These 



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THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIA 



















THE RISE OF RUSSIA 


295 


good men were too busy educating the heathen Teutons to 
bother about the distant Slavs. Hence Russia received its reli¬ 
gion and its alphabet and its first ideas of art and architecture 
from the Byzantine monks; and as the Byzantine Empire (a 
relic of the eastern Roman Empire) had become very oriental 
and had lost many of its European traits, the Russians suffered 
in consequence. 

Politically speaking, these new states of the great Russian 
plains did not fare well. It was the Norse habit to divide 
every inheritance equally among all the sons. No sooner had 
a small state been founded than it was broken up among eight 
or nine heirs who in turn left their territory to an ever-increas- 
ing number of descendants. It was inevitable that these small 
competing states should quarrel among themselves. Anarchy 
was the order of the day. And when the red glow of the east¬ 
ern horizon told the people of the threatened invasion of a sav¬ 
age Asiatic tribe, the little states were too weak and too divided 
to render any sort of defence against this terrible enemy. 

It was in the year 1224 that the first great Tartar invasion 
took place and that the hordes of Jenghiz Khan, the conqueror 
of China, Bokhara, Tashkent, and Turkestan made their first 
appearance in the west. The Slavic armies were beaten near 
the Kalka River, and Russia was at the mercy of the Mongo¬ 
lians. Just as suddenly as they had come they disappeared. 
Thirteen years later, in 1237, however, they returned. In less 
than five years they conquered every part of the vast Russian 
plains. Until the year 1380 the Tartars remained the masters 
of the Russian people. 

All in all, it took the Russians two centuries to deliver 
themselves from this yoke. For a yoke it was, and a most 
offensive and objectionable one. It turned the Slavic peasants 
into miserable slaves. No Russian could hope to survive un¬ 
less he was willing to creep before a dirty little yellow man who 
sat in a tent somewhere in the heart of the steppes of southern 
Russia and spat at him. It deprived the mass of the people of 
all feeling of honor and independence. It made hunger and 
misery and maltreatment and personal abuse the normal state 


296 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of human existence; until at last the average Russian, were he 
peasant or nobleman, went about his business like a neglected 
dog who has been beaten so often that his spirit has been broken 
and he dare not wag his tail without permission. 

There was no escape. The horsemen of the Tartar Khan 
were fast and merciless. The endless prairie did not give a 
man a chance to cross into the safe territory of his neighbor. 
He must keep quiet and bear what his yellow master decided 
to inflict upon him or run the risk of death. Of course, Europe 
might have interfered. But Europe was engaged upon busi¬ 
ness of its own, fighting the quarrels between the pope and 
the emperor or suppressing this or that or the other heresy. 
And so Europe left the Slav to his fate, and forced him to 
work out his own salvation. 

The final savior of Russia was one of the many small states 
founded by the early Norse rulers. It was situated in the heart 
of the Russian plain. Its capital, Moscow, was situated upon a 
steep hill on the banks of the Moskwa River. This little prin¬ 
cipality, by dint of pleasing the Tartar when it was necessary to 
please and opposing him when it was safe to do so, had during 

the middle of the fourteenth centurv made itself the leader 

•/ 

of a new national life. It must be remembered that the Tar¬ 
tars were wholly deficient in constructive political ability. They 
could only destroy. Their chief aim in conquering new ter¬ 
ritories was to obtain revenue. To get this revenue in the 
form of taxes, it was necessary to allow certain remnants of 
the old political organization to continue. Hence there were 
many little towns, surviving by the grace of the Great Khan 
that they might act as tax-gatherers and rob their neighbors 
for the benefit of the Tartar treasury. 

The state of Moscow, growing fat at the expense of the 
surrounding territory, finally became strong enough to risk 
open rebellion against its masters, the Tartars. It was success¬ 
ful, and its fame as the leader in the cause of Russian inde¬ 
pendence made Moscow the natural center for all those who 
still believed in a better future for the Slavic race. In the year 
1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks. Ten years 



MOSCOW 
























298 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


later, under the rule of Ivan III, Moscow informed the West¬ 
ern world that the Slavic state laid claim to the worldly and 
spiritual inheritance of the lost Byzantine Empire and such 
traditions of the Roman Empire as had survived in Constan¬ 
tinople. A generation afterward, under Ivan the Terrible, 
the grand dukes of Moscow were strong enough to adopt the 
title of Csesar, or Tsar, and to demand recognition by the West. 

In the year 1598 the old Muscovite dynasty came to an 
end. For the next seven years a Tartar half-breed by the 
name of Boris Godunow reigned as tsar. It was during this 
period that the future destiny of the large masses of the Rus¬ 
sian people was decided. This empire was rich in land but 
very poor in money. There was no trade and there were no 
factories. Its few cities were dirty villages. It was composed 
of a strong central government and a vast number of illiterate 
peasants. This government, a mixture of Slavic, Norse, 
Byzantine, and Tartar influences, recognized nothing beyond 
the interest of the state. To defend this state, it needed an 
army. To gather the taxes, which were necessary to pay the 
soldiers, it needed civil servants. To pay these many officials, 
it needed land. In the vast wilderness on the east and west 
there was a sufficient supply of this commodity. But land 
without a few laborers to till the fields and tend the cattle has 
no value. Therefore the old nomadic peasants were robbed of 
one privilege after the other, until finally, during the first years 
of the seventeenth century, they were formally made a part 
of the soil upon which they lived. The Russian peasants ceased 
to he freemen. They became serfs or slaves and they re¬ 
mained serfs until the year 1861, when their fate had become 
so terrible that they were beginning to die out. 

In the seventeenth century, this new state with its grow¬ 
ing territory, which was spreading quickly into Siberia, had 
become a force with which the rest of Europe was obliged to 
reckon. In 1613, after the death of Boris Godunow, the Rus¬ 
sian nobles had elected one of their own number to be tsar. 
He was Michael, the son of Feodor, of the Moscow family of 
Romanow who lived in a little house just outside the Kremlin. 


THE RISE OE RUSSIA 


299 


in the year 1672 his great-grandson, Peter, the son of an¬ 
other Feodor, was born. When the child was ten years old, 
his step-sister Sophia took possession of the Russian throne. 
The little boy was allowed to spend his days in the suburbs of 
the national capital, where the foreigners lived. Surrounded 
by Scotch barkeepers, Dutch traders, Swiss apothecaries, Ital¬ 
ian barbers, French dancing teachers, and German schoolmas¬ 
ters, the young prince obtained a first but rather extraordinary 
impression of that far-away and mysterious Europe where 
things were done differently. 

When he was seventeen years old, he suddenly pushed 
* Sister Sophia from the throne. Peter himself became the ruler 
of Russia. He was not contented with being the tsar of a 
semi-barbarous and half-Asiatic people. He must be the sov¬ 
ereign head of a civilized nation. To change Russia overnight 
from a Byzantine-Tartar state into a European empire was no 
small undertaking. It needed strong hands and a capable 
head. Peter possessed both. In the year 1698, the great op¬ 
eration of grafting Modern Europe upon Ancient Russia was 
performed. The patient did not die. But he never got over 
the shock, as the events of the last five years have shown very 
plainly. 


RUSSIA os. SWEDEN 



In the year 1698, Tsar 
Peter set forth upon his first 
voyage to western Europe. He . 
traveled by way of Berlin and 
went to Holland and to Eng¬ 
land. As a child he had almost 
been drowned sailing a home¬ 
made boat in the duck pond of 
his father’s countrv home. His 
passion for water remained 
with him to the end of his life. 
In a practical way it showed 
itself in his wish to give his 
landlocked domains access to 
the open sea. 

While the unpopular and harsh young ruler was away 
from home, the friends of the old Russian ways in Moscow set 
to work to undo all his reforms. A sudden rebellion among 
his lifeguards, the Streltsi regiment, forced Peter to hasten 
home by the fast mail. He appointed himself executioner-in¬ 
chief, and the Streltsi were hanged and quartered to the last 
man. Sister Sophia, who had been the head of the rebellion, 
was locked up in a cloister and the rule of Peter began in 
earnest. This scene was repeated in the year 1716 when 
Peter had gone on his second western trip. That time the 
reactionaries followed the leadership of Peter’s half-witted son, 
Alexis. Again the tsar returned in great haste. Alexis was 


PETER THE GREAT IN 
THE DUTCH SHIPYARD 


300 
















RUSSIA VS. SWEDEN 


301 


beaten to death in his prison cell and the friends of the old- 
fashioned Byzantine ways marched thousands of dreary miles 
to their final destination in the Siberian lead mines. After 
that, no further outbreaks of popular discontent took place. 
Until the time of his death, Peter could reform in peace. 

It is not easy to give you a list of his reforms in chronologi¬ 
cal order. The tsar worked with furious haste. He followed 
no system. He issued his decrees with such rapidity that it is 
difficult to keep count. Peter seemed to feel that everything 
that had ever happened before was entirely wrong. The whole 
of Russia therefore must be changed within the shortest possible 
time. When he died he left behind a well-trained army of 
200,000 men and a navy of fifty ships. The old system of gov¬ 
ernment had been abolished overnight. The Duma, or con¬ 
vention of nobles, had been dismissed, and in its stead the tsar 
had surrounded himself with an advisory board of state offi- 
cials, called the Senate. 

Russia was divided into eight large “governments” or prov¬ 
inces. Roads were constructed. Towns were built. Industries 
were created wherever it pleased the tsar, without any regard 
for the presence of raw material. Canals were dug, and mines 
were opened in the mountains of the east. In this land of illiter¬ 
ates, schools were founded and establishments of higher learn¬ 
ing, together with universities and hospitals and professional 
schools. Dutch naval engineers and tradesmen and artisans 
from all over the world were encouraged to move to Russia. 
Printing shops were established, but all books must first be read 
by the imperial censors. The duties of each class of society 
were carefully written down in a new law and the entire system 
of civil and criminal laws was gathered into a series of printed 
volumes. The old Russian costumes were abolished bv im- 
perial decree, and policemen, armed with scissors, watching 
all the country roads, changed the long-haired Russian mou- 
jiks suddenly into a pleasing imitation of smooth-shaven west- 
Europeans. 

In religious matters, the tsar tolerated no division of 
power. There must be no chance of a rivalry between an em- 


302 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


peror and a pope as had happened in Europe. In the year 
1721, Peter made himself head of the Russian Church. The 
Patriarchate of Moscow was abolished and the Holy Synod 
made its appearance as the highest source of authority in all 
matters of the Established Church. 

Since, however, these many reforms could not be success¬ 
ful while the old Russian elements had a rallying point in the 
town of Moscow, Peter decided to move his government to a 
new capital. Amidst the unhealthy marshes of the Baltic Sea 
the tsar built this new city. He began to reclaim the land in 



PETER THE GREAT BUILDS HIS NEW CAPITAL 


the year 1703. Forty thousand peasants worked for years 
to lay the foundations for this imperial city. The Swedes at¬ 
tacked Peter and tried to destroy his town, and illness and 
misery killed tens of thousands of the peasants. But the work 
was continued, winter and summer, and the ready-made town 
soon began to grow. In the year 1712, it was officially de- 
declared to be the imperial residence. A dozen years later 
it had 75,000 inhabitants. Twice a year the whole city was 
flooded by the Neva. But the terrific will-power of the tsar 
created dykes and canals and the floods ceased to do harm. 




































RUSSIA VS. SWEDEN 


303 


When Peter died in 1725 he was the owner of the largest city 
in northern Europe. 

Of course, this sudden growth of so dangerous a rival had 
been a source of great worry to all the neighbors. From his 
side, Peter had watched with interest the many adventures of 
his Baltic rival, the kingdom of Sweden. In the year 1654 
Christina, the only daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, the hero 
of the Thirty Years War, had renounced the throne and had 
gone to Rome to end her days as a devout Catholic. A Protes¬ 
tant nephew of Gustavus Adolphus had succeeded her. Under 
Charles X and Charles XI, the new dynasty had brought 
Sweden to its highest point of development. But in 1697, 
Charles XI died suddenly and was succeeded by a boy of 
fifteen, Charles XII. 

This was the moment for which many of the northern states 
had waited. During the great religious wars of the seventeenth 
century, Sweden had grown at the expense of her neighbors. 
The time had come, so the owners thought, to balance the ac¬ 
count. At once war broke out between Russia, Poland, Den¬ 
mark, and Saxony on the one side, and Sweden on the other. 
The raw and untrained armies of Peter were disastrously beat¬ 
en by Charles in the famous battle of Xarva in November of 
the year 1700. Then Charles, one of the most interesting mili¬ 
tary geniuses of that century, turned against his other enemies, 
and for nine years he hacked and burned his way through the 
villages and cities of Poland, Saxony, Denmark, and the Baltic 
provinces, while Peter drilled his soldiers in distant Russia. 

As a result, in the year 1709, in the battle of Poltawa, the 
Moscovites destroyed the exhausted armies of Sweden. Charles 
continued to be a highly picturesque figure, a wonderful hero 
of romance, but in his vain attempt to have his revenge he 
ruined his own country. In the year 1718 he was accidentally 
killed or assassinated (we do not know which), and when peace 
was made in 1721 Sweden had lost all of her former Baltic 
possessions except Finland. The new Russian state, created 
by Peter, had become the leading power of northern Europe. 
But already a new rival, Prussia, was on the way. 


THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 


The history of Prussia is the history of a frontier district. 
In the ninth century, Charlemagne had transferred the old 
center of civilization from the Mediterranean to the wild re¬ 
gions of northwestern Europe. His Frankish soldiers had 
pushed the frontier of Europe farther and farther toward the 
east. They had conquered many lands from the heathenish 
Slavs and Lithuanians who were living in the plain between 
the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains, and the Franks 
administered those outlying districts just as the LTnited States 
used to administer her territories before they achieved the 
dignity of statehood. 

The frontier state of Brandenburg had been originally 
founded by Charlemagne to defend his eastern possessions 
against raids of the wild Saxon tribes. The Wends, a Slavic 
tribe which inhabited that region, were subjugated during the 
tenth century and their market place, by the name of Brenna- 
bor, became the center of and gave its name to the new province 
of Brandenburg. 

During the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth 
centuries a succession of noble families exercised the functions 
of imperial governor in this frontier state. Finally, in the fif¬ 
teenth century, the House of Hohenzollern made its appear¬ 
ance and, as Electors of Brandenburg, began to change a 

sandy and forlorn frontier territory into one of the most ef- 
* • 

ficient empires of the modern world. 


304 







THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 


305 


These Hohenzollerns, who have just been removed from 
the historical stage by the combined forces of Europe and 
America, came originally from southern Germany. They were 
of very humble origin. In the twelfth century a certain Fred¬ 
erick of Hohenzollern had made a lucky marriage and had been 
appointed keeper of the castle of Nuremberg. His descendants 
had used every chance and every opportunity to improve their 
power, and after several centuries of watchful grabbing they 
had been appointed to the dignity of Elector, the name given to 
those sovereign princes who were supposed to elect the em¬ 
perors of the old German Empire. During the Reformation, 
they had taken the side of the Protestants and the early seven¬ 
teenth century found them among the most powerful of the 
north German princes. 

During the Thirty Years War, both Protestants and 
Catholics had plundered Brandenburg and Prussia with equal 
zeal. But under Frederick William, the Great Elector, the 
damage was quickly repaired and by a wise and careful use of 
all the economic and intellectual forces of the country, a state 
was founded in which there was practically no waste. 

Modern Prussia, a state in which the individual and his 
wishes and aspirations have been entirely absorbed by the 
interests of the community as a whole—this Prussia dates back 
to the father of Frederick the Great. Frederick William I was 
a hard-working, parsimonious Prussian sergeant, with a great 
love for barroom stories and strong Dutch tobacco, an intense 
dislike for all frills and feathers (especially if they were of 
French origin), and possessed of but one idea. That idea was 
Dutv. Severe with himself, he tolerated no weakness in his 
subjects, whether they be generals or common soldiers. The 
relation between himself and his son Frederick was never cor¬ 
dial, to say the least. The boorish manners of the father of- 
fended the finer spirit of the son. The son’s love for French 
manners, literature, philosophy, and music was rejected by the 
father as a manifestation of sissy-ness. There followed a ter- 
rible outbreak between these two strange temperaments. Fred- 
erick tried to escape to England. He was caught and court- 



306 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


martialed and forced to witness the decapitation of his best 
friend, who had tried to help him. Thereupon, as part of his 
punishment, the young prince was sent to a little fortress some¬ 
where in the provinces to be taught the details of his future 
business of being a king. It proved a blessing in disguise. 
When Frederick came to the throne in 1740, he knew how his 
country was managed from the birth certificate of a pauper’s 
son to the minutest detail of a complicated annual budget. 

As an author, especially in his book called the “Anti- 
Macchiavelli,” Frederick had expressed his contempt for the 
political creed of the ancient Florentine historian, who had 
advised his princely pupils to lie and cheat whenever it was 
necessary to do so for the benefit of their country. The ideal 
ruler in Frederick’s volume was the first servant of his people, 
the enlightened despot after the example of Louis XIV. In 
practice, however, Frederick, while working for his people 
twenty hours a day, tolerated no one near him as a coun¬ 
sellor. His ministers were superior clerks. Prussia was his 
private possession, to be treated according to his own wishes. 
And nothing was allowed to interfere with the interest of the 
state. 

In the year 1740 the Emperor Charles VI of Austria died. 
He had tried to make the position of his only daughter, 
Maria Theresa, secure through a solemn treaty, written black 
on white, upon a large piece of parchment. But no sooner had 
the old emperor been deposited in the ancestral crypt of the 
Habsburg family, than the armies of Frederick were marching 
toward the Austrian frontier to occupy that part of Silesia for 
which (together with almost everything else in central Eu¬ 
rope) Prussia clamored, on account of some ancient and very 
doubtful rights of claim. In a number of wars, Frederick 
conquered all of Silesia, and although he was often very near 
defeat, he maintained himself in his newly acquired territories 
against all Austrian counter-attacks. 

Europe took due notice of this sudden appearance of a 
very powerful new state. In the eighteenth century, the Ger¬ 
mans were a people who had been ruined by the great religious 


\ 


THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 


307 


wars and who were not held in high esteem by anyone. Fred¬ 
erick, by an effort as sudden and quite as terrific as that of 
Peter of Russia, changed this attitude of contempt into one 
of fear. The internal affairs of Prussia were arranged so 
skillfully that the subjects had less reason for complaint than 
elsewhere. The treasury showed an annual surplus instead of a 
deficit. Torture was abolished. The judiciary system was im¬ 
proved. Good roads and good schools and good universities, 
together with a scrupulously honest administration, made the 
people feel that whatever services were demanded of them, 
they (to speak the vernacular) got their money’s worth. 

After having been for several centuries the battlefield of 
the French and the Austrians and the Swedes and the Danes 
and the Poles, Germany, encouraged by the example of Prus¬ 
sia, began to regain self-confidence. And this was the work of 
the little old man, with his hook nose and his old uniforms cov¬ 
ered with snuff, who said very funny but very unpleasant things 
about his neighbors, and who played the scandalous game of 
eighteenth century diplomacy without any regard for the truth, 
provided he could gain something by his lies. This in spite of 
his book, “Anti-Macchiavelli.” In the year 1786 the end 
came. His friends were all gone. Children he had never had. 
He died alone, tended by a single servant and his faithful 
dogs, whom he loved better than human beings because, as he 
said, they were never ungrateful and remained true to their 
friends. 



THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM 


We have seen how, during the sixteenth and the seventeenth 
centuries, the states of our modern world began to take shape. 
Their origins were different in almost every case. Some had 
been the result of the deliberate effort of a single king. Others 
had happened by chance. Still others had been the result of 
favorable natural geographic boundaries. But once they had 
been founded, they had all of them tried to strengthen their 
internal administration and to exert the greatest possible in¬ 
fluence upon foreign affairs. All this of course had cost a great 
deal of money. The medieval state with its lack of centralized 
power did not depend upon a rich treasury. The king got his 
revenues from the crown domains and his civil service paid for 
itself. The modern centralized state was a more complicated 
affair. The old knights disappeared and hired government 
officials or bureaucrats took their place. Army, navy, and in¬ 
ternal administration demanded millions. The question then 
became—where was this money to he found? 

Gold and silver had been rare commodities in the middle 

ages. The average man, as I have told you, never saw a gold 

piece as long as he lived. Only the inhabitants of the large 

cities were familiar with silver coin. The discovery of America 

and the exploitation of the Peruvian mines changed all this. 

The center of trade was transferred from the Mediterranean to 

the Atlantic seaboard. The old “commercial cities” of Italy lost 

%> 

their financial importance. New “commercial nations” took 
their place and gold and silver were no longer a curiosity. 


308 









THE VOYAGE OF THE PILGRIMS 


















310 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Through Spain and Portugal and Holland and England, 
precious metals began to find their way to Europe. The six¬ 
teenth century had its own writers on the subject of political 
economy, and they evolved a theory of national wealth which 
seemed to them entirely sound and of the greatest possible 
benefit to their respective countries. They reasoned that both 
gold and silver were actual wealth. Therefore they believed 
that the country with the largest supply of actual cash in the 
vaults of its treasury and its banks was at the same time the 
richest country. And since money meant armies, it followed 
that the richest country was also the most powerful and could 
rule the rest of the world. 

We call this system the “mercantile system,” and it was 
accepted with the same unquestioning faith with which the 
early Christians believed in miracles and many of the present- 
day Amercan business men believe in the tariff. In practice, 
the mercantile system worked out as follows: To get the 
largest surplus of precious metals a country must have a 
favorable balance of export trade. If you can export more to 
your neighbor than he exports to your own country, he will 
owe you money and will be obliged to send you some of his 
gold. Hence you gain and he loses. As a result of this creed, 
the economic program of almost every seventeenth century 
state was as follows: 

1. Try to get possession of as many precious metals as 

you can. 

2. Encourage foreign trade in preference to domestic 

trade. 

3. Encourage those industries which change raw ma¬ 

terials into exportable finished products. 

4. Encourage a large population, for you will need work¬ 

men for your factories and an agricultural com¬ 
munity does not raise enough workmen. 

5. Let the State watch this process and interfere when¬ 

ever it is necessary to do so. 

Instead of regarding international trade as something akin 
to a force of nature which would always obey certain nat- 



HOW EUROPE CONQUERED THE WORLD 













312 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 



ural laws regardless of man’s interference, the people of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to regulate their com¬ 
merce by the help of official decrees and royal laws and financial 
help on the part of the government. 

In the sixteenth century Charles V adopted this mercan¬ 
tile system (which was then something entirely new) and in¬ 
troduced it into his many possessions. Elizabeth of England 
flattered him by her imitation. The Bourbons, especially King 


SEA POWER 

Louis XIV, were fanatical adherents of this doctrine and Col¬ 
bert, Louis’s great minister of finance, became the prophet of 
mercantilism to whom all Europe looked for guidance. 

The entire foreign policy of Cromwell was a practical ap¬ 
plication of the mercantile system. It was invariably directed 
against the rich rival republic of Holland. For the Dutch 
shippers, as the common carriers of the merchandise of Eu¬ 
rope, had certain leanings toward free trade and therefore had 

to be destroved at all cost. 

•/ 

It will be easily understood how such a system must affect 

the colonies. A colony under the mercantile system became 

% % 









THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM 


313 


merely a reservoir of gold and silver and spices, which was 
to be tapped for the benefit of the home country. The Asiatic, 
American, and African supply of precious metals and the raw 
materials of these tropical countries became a monopoly of 
the state which happened to own that particular colony. No 
outsider was ever allowed within the precincts, and no native 
was permitted to trade with a merchant whose ship flew a for¬ 
eign flag. 

Undoubtedly the mercantile system encouraged the de¬ 
velopment of young industries in certain countries where there 
never had been any manufacturing before. It built roads 
and dug canals and made for better means of transportation. 
It demanded greater skill among the workmen and gave the 
merchant a better social position, while it weakened the power 
of the landed aristocracy. 

On the other hand, it caused very great misery. It made 
the natives in the colonies the victims of a most shameless ex¬ 
ploitation. It exposed the citizens of the home country to an 
even more terrible fate. It helped in a great measure to turn 
every land into an armed camp and divided the world into little 
bits of territory, each working for its own direct benefit, 
while striving at all times to destroy the power of its neigh¬ 
bors and get hold of their treasures. It laid so much stress 
upon the importance of owning wealth that ‘‘being rich” came 
to be regarded as the sole virtue of the average citizen. Eco¬ 
nomic systems come and go like the fashions in surgery and 
in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the 
mercantile system was discarded in favor of a system of free 
and open competition. At least, so I have been told. 


THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 


For the sake of convenience, we ought to go back a few cen¬ 
turies and repeat the early history of the great struggle for 

colonial possessions. 

As soon as a number of Eu¬ 
ropean nations had been created 
upon the new basis of national 
or dynastic interests, that is to 
say, during and immediately 
after the Thirty Years War, 
their rulers, backed up by the 
capital of their merchants and 
the ships of their trading com¬ 
panies, continued to fight for 
more territory in Asia, Africa, 
and America. 

The Spaniards and the Por¬ 
tuguese had been exploring the 
Indian and the Pacific oceans for more than a century ere 
Holland and England appeared upon the stage. This proved 
an advantage to the latter. The first rough work had already 
been done. What is more, the earliest navigators had so often 
made themselves unpopular with the Asiatic and American and 
African natives that both the English and the Dutch were 
welcomed as friends and deliverers. We cannot claim any 
superior virtues for either of these two races. But they were 



THE FIGHT FOR LIBERTY 











THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 


315 


merchants before everything else. They never allowed religious 
considerations to interfere with their practical common sense. 
During their first relations with weaker races, all European na¬ 
tions have behaved with shocking brutality. The English and 
the Dutch, however, knew better where to draw the line. Pro¬ 
vided they got their spices and their gold and silver and their 
taxes, they were willing to let the native live as it best pleased 
him. 



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THE PILGRIMS 


It was not very difficult for them, therefore, to establish 
themselves in the richest parts of the world. But as soon as 
this had been accomplished, they began to fight each other for 
still further possessions. Strangely enough, the colonial wars 
were rarely settled in the colonies themselves. They were de¬ 
cided three thousand miles away by the navies of the contending 
countries. It is one of the most interesting principles of an¬ 
cient and modern warfare (one of the few reliable laws of 












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HOW THE WHITE MAN SETTLED IN NORTH AMERICA 




















THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 


317 


history) that “the nation which commands the sea is also the 
nation which commands the land.” So far this law has never 
failed to work, but the modern airplane may change it. In 
the eighteenth century, however, there were no flying machines, 
and it was the British navy which gained for England her vast 
American and Indian and African colonies. 

The series of naval wars between England and Holland in 
the seventeenth century does not interest us here. It ended as 
all such encounters between hopelessly ill-matched powers will 
end. But the warfare between England and France (her other 
rival) is of greater importance to us, for while the superior 
British fleet in the end defeated the French navy, a great deal 
of the preliminary fighting was done on our own American 
continent. In this vast country, both France and England 
claimed everything which had been discovered and a lot more 
which the eye of no white man had ever seen. In 1497 Cabot 
had landed in the northern part of America and twenty-seven 
years later Giovanni Verrazano had visited these coasts. Cabot 
had flown the English flag. Verrazano had sailed under the 
French flag. Hence both England and France proclaimed 
themselves the owners of the entire continent. 

During the seventeenth century some ten small English 
colonies had been founded between Maine and the Carolinas. 
They were usually a haven of refuge for some particular sect 
of English dissenters, such as the Puritans, who in the year 
1620 went to New England, or the Quakers, who settled in 
Pennsylvania in 1681. They were small frontier communi¬ 
ties, nestling close to the shores of the ocean, where people had 
gathered to make a new home and begin life among happier 
surroundings, far away from royal supervision and interfer¬ 
ence. 

The French colonies, on the other hand, always remained 
a possession of the crown. No Huguenots or Protestants were 
allowed in these colonies for fear that they might contaminate 
the Indians with their dangerous Protestant doctrines and 
would perhaps interfere with the missionary work of the Jesuit 
fathers. The English colonies, therefore, had been founded 


318 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


upon a much healthier basis than their French neighbors and 
rivals. They were an expression of the commercial energy of 
the English middle classes, while the French settlements were 
inhabited by people who had crossed the ocean as servants of 
the king and who expected to return to Paris at the first 
possible chance. 

Politically, however, the position of the English colonies 
was far from satisfactory. The French had discovered the 



IN THE CABIN OF THE MAYFLOWER 


mouth of the St. Lawrence in the sixteenth century. From 
the region of the Great Lakes they had worked their way south¬ 
ward, had descended the Mississippi, and had built several 
fortifications along the Gulf of Mexico. After a centurv of 
exploration, a line of sixty French forts cut off the English 
settlements along the Atlantic seaboard from the interior. 












































THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 


319 


The English land grants made to the different colonial 
companies had given them "‘all land from sea to sea.” This 
sounded well on paper, but in practice British territory ended 
where the line of French fortifications began. To break 
through this barrier was possible, but it took both men and 
money and caused a series of horrible border wars in which 
both sides murdered their white neighbors with the help of the 
Indian tribes. 

As long as the Stuarts had ruled England there had been 
no danger of war with France. The Stuarts needed the Bour¬ 
bons in their attempts to establish an autocratic form of govern- 



THE FRENCH EXPLORE THE WEST 


ment and to break the power of Parliament. But in 1689 the 
last of the Stuarts had disappeared from British soil and Dutch 
William, the great enemy of Louis XIV, succeeded him. From 
that time, until the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France and 
England fought for the possession of India and North Amer¬ 
ica. 

During these wars, as I have said before, the English navies 
invariably beat the French. Cut off from her colonies, France 
lost most of her possessions, and when peace was declared the 
entire North American continent had fallen into British hands 
and the great work of exploration of Cartier, Champlain, La 
Salle, Marquette, and a score of others was lost to France. 


























320 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Only a very small part of this vast domain was inhabited. 
From Massachusetts in the north, where the Pilgrims (a sect 
of Puritans who were very intolerant and who therefore had 
found no happiness either in Anglican England or Calvinist 
Holland) had landed in the year 1620, to the Carolinas and 
Virginia (the tobacco-raising provinces which had been founded 

entirely for the 
sake of profit), 
stretched a thin 
line of sparsely 
populated terri¬ 
tory. But the men 
who lived in this 
new land of fresh 
air and high skies 
were very different 
from their breth¬ 
ren of the mother 
country. In the 
wilderness they had learned independence and self-reliance. 
They were the sons of hardy and energetic ancestors. Lazy and 
timorous people did not cross the ocean in those days. The 
American colonists hated the restraint and the lack of breathing 
space which had made their lives in the old country so very un- 
happy. They meant to be their own masters. This the ruling 
classes of England did not seem to understand. The govern¬ 
ment annoved the colonists and the colonists, who hated to be 
bothered in this way, began to annoy the British government. 

Bad feeling caused more had feeling. It is not necessary 
to repeat here in detail what actually happened and what might 
have been avoided if the British king had been more intelli¬ 
gent than George III or less given to drowsiness and indiffer¬ 
ence than his minister, Lord North. The British colonists, 
when they understood that peaceful arguments would not 
settle the difficulties, took to arms. From being loyal sub¬ 
jects, they turned rebels, who exposed themselves to the pun¬ 
ishment of death when they were captured by the German 



THE FIRST WINTER IN NEW ENGLAND 









THE BLOCKHOUSE IN THE WILDERNESS 













































322 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


soldiers, whom George hired to do his fighting after the pleas¬ 
ant custom of that day. 

The war between England and her American colonies 
lasted seven years. During most of that time, the final suc¬ 
cess of the rebels seemed very doubtful. A great number of 
the people, especially in the cities, had remained loyal to their 
king. They were in favor of a compromise, and would have 
been willing to sue for peace. But the great figure of Wash¬ 
ington stood guard over the cause of the colonists. 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 


Ably assisted by a handful of brave men, he used his stead¬ 
fast but badly equipped armies to weaken the forces of the king. 
Time and again when defeat seemed unavoidable, his strategy 
turned the tide of battle. Often his men were ill-fed. During 
the winter they lacked shoes and coats and were forced to live 
in unhealthy dugouts. But their trust in their great leader 
was absolute and they stuck it out until the final hour of victory. 

But more interesting than the campaigns of Washington 
or the diplomatic triumphs of Benjamin Franklin, who was 
in Europe getting money from the French government and 



















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THE GREAT AMERICAN REVOLUTION 





















324 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the Amsterdam bankers, was an event which occurred early in 
the revolution. The representatives of the different colonies 
had gathered in Philadelphia to discuss matters of common 
importance. It was the first year of the Revolution. Most 
of the big towns of the seacoast were still in the hands of the 
British. Reinforcements from England were arriving by the 
shipload. Only men who were deeply convinced of the right¬ 
eousness of their cause would have found the courage to take 
the momentous decision of the months of June and July of 
the year 1776. 

In June, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a mo¬ 
tion to the Continental Congress that “these united colonies 
are, and of right ought to he, free and independent states, that 
they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and 
that all political connection between them and the state of 
Great Britain is and ought to be, totally dissolved.” 

The motion was seconded by John Adams of Massachu- 
setts. It was carried on July the second, and on July fourth 
it was followed by an official Declaration of Independence. 
This was the work of Thomas Jefferson, a serious and ex¬ 
ceedingly capable student of both politics and government and 
destined to be one of the most famous of our American presi¬ 
dents. 

When news of this event reached Europe, and was fol¬ 
lowed by the final victory of the colonists and the adoption of 
the famous Constitution of the year 1787 (the first of all writ¬ 
ten constitutions), it caused great interest. The dynastic sys¬ 
tem of the highly centralized states, which had been developed 
after the great religious wars of the seventeenth century, had 
reached the height of its power. Everywhere the palace of 
the king had grown to enormous proportions, while the cities 
of the royal realm were being surrounded by rapidly growing 
acres of slums. The inhabitants of those slums were showing 
signs of restlessness. They were quite helpless. But the 
higher classes, the nobles and the professional men, they too 
were beginning to have certain doubts about the economic and 
political conditions under which they lived. The success of 


THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 


325 


the American colonists showed them that many things were 
possible which had been held impossible only a short time 
before. 

According to the poet, the shot which opened the battle 
of Lexington was “heard around the world.” That was a bit 
of exaggeration. The Chinese and the Japanese and the 
Russians (not to speak of the Australians and the Hawaiians 
who had just been rediscovered by Captain Cook, whom they 
had killed for his trouble) never heard of it at all. But it 
carried across the Atlantic Ocean. It landed in the powder 
house of European discontent and in France it caused an ex¬ 
plosion which rocked the entire continent from Petrograd to 
Madrid and buried the representatives of the old statecraft and 
the old diplomacy under several tons of democratic bricks. 


THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


Before we talk about a revolution it is perhaps as well that 
we explain just what this word means. In the terms of a 
great Russian writer (and Russians ought to know what they 
are talking about in this held) a revolution is “a swift over¬ 
throw, in a few years, of institutions which have taken cen¬ 
turies to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that 
even the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in 
their writings. It is the fall, the crumbling away in a brief 
period, of all that up to that time has composed the essence 
of social, religious, political, and economic life in a nation.” 

Such a revolution took place in France in the eighteenth 
century when the old civilization of the country had grown 
stale. The king in the days of Louis XIV had become 
EVERYTHING and was the state. The nobility, formerly 
the civil servant of the federal state, found itself without any 
duties and became a social ornament of the royal court. 

This French state of the eighteenth century, however, cost 
incredible sums of money. This money had to be produced 
in the form of taxes. Unfortunately the kings of France had 
not been strong enough to force the nobility and the clergy 
to pay their share of these taxes. Hence the taxes were paid 
entirely by the agricultural population. But the peasants 
living in dreary hovels, no longer in intimate contact with their 


326 







THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


327 


former landlords but victims of cruel and incompetent land 
agents, were going from bad to worse. Why should they 
work and exert themselves? Increased returns upon their land 
merely meant more taxes and nothing for themselves, and 
therefore they neglected their fields as much as they dared. 

Bence we have a king who wanders in empty splendor 
through the vast halls of his palaces, habitually followed by 
hungry office seekers, all of whom live upon the revenue ob¬ 
tained from peasants who are no better off than the beasts of 
the fields. It is not a pleasant picture, but it is not exag¬ 
gerated. There was, however, another side to the so-called 
“Ancien Regime” which we must keep in mind. 

A wealthy middle class, closely connected with the nobility 
(by the usual process of the rich banker’s daughter marrying 
the poor baron’s son), and a court composed of all the most 
entertaining people of France, had brought the polite art of 
graceful living to its highest development. As the best brains 
of the country were not allowed to occupy themselves with 
questions of political economics, they spent their idle hours 
upon the discussion of abstract ideas. 

As fashions in modes of thought and personal behavior 
are quite as likely to run to extremes as fashion in dress, it 
was natural that the most artificial society of that day should 
take a tremendous interest in what they considered “the simple 
life.” The king and the queen, the absolute and unquestioned 
proprietors of Franee, and all its colonies and dependencies, to¬ 
gether with their courtiers, went to live in funny little country 
houses all dressed up as milkmaids and stableboys and played 
at being shepherds in a happy vale of ancient Hellas. Around 
them their courtiers danced attendance, their court musicians 
composed lovely minuets, their court barbers devised more and 
more elaborate and costly headgear, until from sheer boredom 
and lack of real jobs this whole artificial world of Versailles 
(the great show place which Louis XIV had built far away 
from his noisy and restless city) talked of nothing but those 
subjects which were farthest removed from their own lives, 
just as a man who is starving will talk of nothing except food. 


328 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


When Voltaire, the courageous old philosopher, playwright, 
historian, and novelist, and the great enemy of all religious 
and political tyranny, began to throw his bombs of criticism 
at everything connected with the established order of things, 
the whole French world applauded him and his theatrical pieces 
played to standing room only. 

iWhen Jean-Jacques Rousseau waxed sentimental about 
primitive man and gave his contemporaries delightful descrip¬ 
tions of the happiness of the original inhabitants of this planet 
(about whom he knew as little as he did about the children, 
upon whose education he was the recognized authority), all 
France read his “ Social Contract,” and this societv in which 
the king and the state were one wept hitter tears when they 
heard Rousseau’s appeal for a return to the blessed days 
when the real sovereignty had lain in the hands of the people 
and when the king had been merely the servant of his people. 

When Montesquieu published his “Persian Letters,” in 
which two distinguished Persian travelers turn the whole ex¬ 
isting society of France topsy-turvy and poke fun at every¬ 
thing from the king down to the lowliest of his six hundred 
pastry cooks, the book immediately went through four editions 
and assured the writer thousands of readers for his famous 
discussion of the “Spirit of the Laws,” in which the noble 
baron compared the excellent English system with the back¬ 
ward system of France and advocated instead of an absolute 
monarchy the establishment of a state in which the executive, 
the legislative, and the judicial powers should be in separate 
hands and should work independently of each other. 

When Lebreton, the Parisian bookseller, announced that 
Messieurs Diderot, d’Alembert, Turgot, and a score of other 
distinguished writers were going to publish an encyclopaedia 
which was to contain “all the new ideas and the new science 
and the new knowledge,” the response from the side of the 
public was most satisfactory, and when after twenty-two years 
the last of the twenty-eight volumes had been finished, the 
somewhat belated interference of the police could not repress 
the enthusiasm with which French society received this most 


THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


329 


important but very dangerous contribution to the discussions 
of the day. 

Here, let me give you a little warning. When you read a 
novel about the French Revolution or see a play or a movie, 
you will easily get the impression that the Revolution was the 
work of the rabble from the 
Paris slums. It was nothing 
of the kind. The mob appears 
often upon the revolutionary 
stage, but invariably at the in¬ 
stigation and under the lead¬ 
ership of those middle-class 
professional men who used the 
hungry multitude as an effi¬ 
cient ally in their warfare upon 
the king and his court. But 
the fundamental ideas which 
caused the revolution were in¬ 
vented by a few brilliant minds, 
and they were at first intro- 
duced into the charming draw¬ 
ing-rooms of the “Ancien 
Regime” to provide amiable 

diversion for the much-bored ladies and gentlemen of His 
Majesty’s court. These pleasant but careless people played 
with the dangerous fireworks of social criticism until the sparks 
fell through the cracks of the floor, which was old and rotten 
just like the rest of the building. Those sparks unfortunately 
landed in the basement where age-old rubbish lay in great 
confusion. Then there was a cry of fire. But the owner of 
the house, who was interested in everything except the manage¬ 
ment of his property, did not know how to put the small blaze 
out. The flame spread rapidly and the entire edifice was 
consumed by the conflagration, which we call the great French 
Revolution. 

For the sake of convenience, we can divide the French 
Revolution into two parts. From 1789 to 1791 there was a 



THE GUILLOTINE 


































330 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


more or less orderly attempt to introduce a constitutional mon¬ 
archy. This failed, partly through lack of good faith and 
stupidity on the part of the monarch himself, partly through 
circumstances over which nobody had any control. 

From 1792 to 1799 there was a republic and a first 
effort to establish a democratic form of government. But 
the actual outbreak of violence had been preceded by many 
years of unrest and many sincere but ineffectual attempts at 
reform. 

When France had a debt of 4000 million francs and the 
treasury was always empty and there was not a single thing 
upon which new taxes could be levied, even good King Louis 
( who was an expert locksmith and a great hunter but a very 
poor statesman) felt vaguely that something ought to be done. 
Therefore he called for Turgot, to be his minister of finance. 
Turgot, a splendid representative of the fast disappearing 
class of landed gentry, had been a successful governor of a 
province and was an amateur political economist of great abil¬ 
ity. He did his best. Unfortunately, he could not perform 
miracles. As it was impossible to squeeze more taxes out of 
the ragged peasants, it was necessary to get the necessary funds 
from the nobility and clergy, who had never paid a centime. 
This made Turgot the best hated man at the court of Versailles. 
Furthermore he was obliged to face the enmity of Marie 
Antoinette, the queen, who was against everybody who dared 
to mention the word “economy” within her hearing. Soon 
Turgot was called an “unpractical visionary” and a “theoreti¬ 
cal professor,” and then of course his position became unten¬ 
able. In the year 1776 he was forced to resign. 

After the “professor” there came a man of “practical busi¬ 
ness sense.” He was an industrious Swiss by the name of 
Necker who had made himself rich as a grain speculator and 
the partner in an international banking house. His ambitious 
wife had pushed him into the government service that she 
might establish a position for her daughter, who afterward as 
the wife of the Swedish minister in Paris became a famous 
literary figure of the early nineteenth century. 


THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


331 


Necker set to work with a fine display of zeal, just as 
Turgot had done. In 1781 he published a careful review of 
the French finances. The king understood nothing of this. 
He had just sent troops to America to help the colonists 
against their common enemy, the English. This expedi¬ 
tion proved to be unexpected¬ 
ly expensive and Necker was 
asked to find the necessary 
funds. When, instead of pro¬ 
ducing revenue, he published 
more figures and made statistics 

warning about “necessary econ¬ 
omies,” his days were num¬ 
bered. In the year 1781 he was 
dismissed as an incompetent 
servant. 

After the professor and the 
practical business man came 
the delightful type of financier 
who will guarantee everybody 
100 per cent per month on 
money if they will trust his own 
infallible system. He was 
Charles Alexandre de Calonne, a pushing official, who had 
made his career both by his industry arid his complete lack of 
honesty and scruples. He found the country heavily indebted, 
but he was a clever man, willing to oblige everybody, and he 
invented a quick remedy. He paid the old debts by contract¬ 
ing new ones. This method is not new. The result since time 
immemorial has been disastrous. In less than three years more 
than 800,000,000 francs had been added to the French debt 
by this charming minister of finance who never worried and 
smilingly signed his name to every demand that was made by 
His Majesty and by his lovely queen, who had learned the 
habit of spending during the days of her youth in Vienna. 

At last even the Parliament of Paris (a high court of jus- 


and began to use the dreary 



LOUIS XVI 













332 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


tice and not a legislative body), although by no means lacking 
in loyalty to their sovereign, decided that something must be 
done. Calonne wanted to borrow another 80,000,000 francs. 
It had been a bad year for the crops, and the misery and hunger 
in the country districts were terrible. Unless something sensi¬ 
ble were done, France would go bankrupt. The king as always 
was unaware of the seriousness of the situation. Would it not 
be a good idea to consult the representatives of the people? 
Since 1614 no Estates General had been called together. In 
view of the threatening panic there was a demand that the 
Estates be convened. Louis XVI, however, who never could 
make a decision, refused to go as far as that. 

To pacify the popular clamor he called together a meeting 
of the Notables in the year 1787. This merely meant a gath¬ 
ering of the best families, who discussed what could and should 
be done without touching their feudal and clerical privilege 
of tax-exemption. It is unreasonable to expect that a certain 
class of society shall commit political and economic suicide for 
the benefit of another group of fellow-citizens. The 127 
Notables obstinately refused to surrender a single one of their 
ancient rights. The crowd in the street, being now exceed¬ 
ingly hungry, demanded that Necker, in whom they had confi¬ 
dence, be reappointed. The Notables said “No.” The crowd 
in the street began to smash windows and do other unseemly 
things. The Notables fled. Calonne was dismissed. 

A new colorless minister of finance, the Cardinal Lomenie 
de Brienne, was appointed and Louis, driven by the violent 
threats of his starving subjects, agreed to call together the old 
Estates General “as soon as practicable.” This vague promise 
of course satisfied no one. 

No such severe winter had been experienced for almost a 
century. The crops had been either destroyed by floods or 
frozen to death in the fields. All the olive trees of Provence 
had been killed. Private charity tried to do something but 
could accomplish little for eighteen million starving people. 
Everywhere bread riots occurred. A generation before, these 
would have been put down by the army. But the work of the 


THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


333 


new philosophical school had begun to bear fruit. People be¬ 
gan to understand that a shotgun is no effective remedy for a 
hungry stomach and even the soldiers (who came from among 
the people) were no longer to be depended upon. It was ab¬ 
solutely necessary that the king should do something definite 
to regain the popular good will, but again he hesitated. 

Here and there in the provinces, little independent repub¬ 
lics were established by followers of the new school. The cry 
of “no taxation without representation” (the slogan of the 
American rebels a quarter of a century before) was heard 
among the faithful middle classes. France was threatened 
with general anarchy. To appease the people and to increase 
the royal popularity, the government unexpectedly suspended 
the former very strict form of censorship of books. At once a 
flood of ink descended upon France. Everybody, high or 
low, criticized and was criticized. More than 2000 pamphlets 
were published. Lomenie de Brienne was swept away by a 
storm of abuse. Necker was hastily called back to quell, as 
best he could, the nation-wide unrest. Immediately the stock 
market went up thirty per cent. And by common consent, 
people suspended judgment for a little while longer. In May 
of 1789 the Estates General were to assemble and then the 
wisdom of the entire nation would speedily solve the difficult 
problem of recreating the kingdom of France into a healthy 
and happy state. 

This prevailing idea, that the combined wisdom of the 
people would be able to solve all difficulties, proved disastrous. 
It lamed all personal effort during many important months. 
Instead of keeping the government in his own hands at this 
critical moment, Necker allowed everything to drift. Hence 
there was a new outbreak of the acrimonious debate upon the 
best ways to reform the old kingdom. Everywhere the power 
of the police weakened. The people of the Paris suburbs, 
under the leadership of professional agitators, gradually dis¬ 
covered their strength. They began to play the role which 
was to be theirs all through the years of the great unrest, 
when they acted as the brute force which was used 


by the actual 


334 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


leaders of the Revolution to secure those things which could 
not be obtained in a legitimate fashion. 

Finally the elections took place under the worst conditions 
imaginable. When they were over, 308 clergymen, 285 noble¬ 
men, and 621 representatives of the Third Estate packed their 
trunks to go to Versailles. The Third Estate was obliged to 
carry additional luggage. This consisted of voluminous re- 



THE BASTILLE 

ports in which the many complaints and grievances of their 
constituents had been written down. The stage was set for 
the great final act that was to save France. 

The Estates General came together on May 5th, 1789. The 
king was in a bad humor. The clergy and the nobility let it 
be known that they were unwilling to give up a single one 
of their privileges. The king ordered the three groups of rep¬ 
resentatives to meet in different rooms and discuss their griev- 














































THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


335 


ances separately. The Third Estate refused to obey the royal 
command. They took a solemn oath to that effect in a squash 
court, hastily put in order for the purpose of this illegal meet¬ 
ing on the 20th of June, 1789. They insisted that all three 
Estates, Nobility, Clergy, and Third Estate, should meet to¬ 
gether and so informed His Majesty. The king gave in. 

As the ‘‘National Assembly,” the Estates General began 
to discuss the state of the French kingdom. The king got 
angry. Then again he hesitated. He said that he would never 
surrender his absolute power. Then he went hunting and for¬ 
got all about the cares of the state, and when he returned from 
the chase he gave in. For it was the royal habit to do the right 
thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. When the people 
clamored for A, the king scolded them and gave them nothing. 
Then, when the palace was surrounded by a howling multitude 
of poor people, the king surrendered and gave his subjects 
what they had asked for. By this time, however, the people 
wanted A plus B. The comedy was repeated. When the king 
signed his name to the royal decree which granted his beloved 
subjects A and B, they were threatening to kill the entire royal 
family unless they received A plus B plus C. And so on, 
through the whole alphabet and up to the scaffold. Unfortu¬ 
nately the king was always just one letter behind. He never 
understood this. Even when he laid his head under the guillo¬ 
tine, he felt that he was a much-abused man who had received 
a most unwarrantable treatment at the hands of people whom 
he had loved to the best of his limited ability. 

Historical “ifs,” as I have often warned you, are never of 
any value. It is very easy for us to say that the monarchy 
might have been saved “if” Louis had been a man of greater 
energy and less kindness of heart. But the king was not alone. 
Even “if” he had possessed the ruthless strength of Napoleon, 
his career during these difficult days might easily have been 
ruined by his wife, who was the daughter of Maria Theresa of 
Austria and who possessed all the characteristic virtues and 
vices of a young girl who had been brought up at the most 
autocratic and medieval court of that age. 


336 


THE STORY OE MANKIND 


She decided that some action must he taken and planned a 
counter-revolution. Necker was suddenly dismissed and loyal 
troops were called to Paris. The people, when they heard of 
this, stormed the fortress of the Bastille prison, and on the 
fourteenth of July of the year 1789 they destroyed this familiar 
but much-hated symbol of autocratic power which had long 
since ceased to be a political prison and was now used as the 
city lock-up for pickpockets and second-story men. Many of 
the nobles took the hint and left the country. But the king 
as usual did nothing. He had been hunting on the day of the 
fall of the Bastille and he had shot several deer and felt very 
much pleased. 

The National Assembly now set to work and on the 4th of 
August, with the noise of the Parisian multitude in their ears, 
they abolished all privileges. This was followed on the 27th 
of August by the ‘'Declaration of the Bights of Man,” the 
famous preamble to the first French Constitution. So far, so 
good; but the court had apparently not yet learned its lesson. 
There was a widespread suspicion that the king was again 
trying to interfere with these reforms and as a result, on the 
5th of October, there was a second riot in Paris. It spread to 
Versailles and the people were not pacified until they had 
brought the king hack to his palace in Paris. They did not 
trust him in Versailles. They liked to have him where they 
could watch him and control his correspondence with his rela¬ 
tives in Vienna and Madrid and the other courts of Europe. 

In the Assembly, meanwhile, Mirabeau, a nobleman who 
had become leader of the Third Estate, was beginning to put 
order into chaos. But before he could save the position of the 
king he died, on the 2nd of April of the year 1791. The king, 
who now began to fear for his own life, tried to escape on the 
21st of June. He was recognized from his picture on a coin, 
was stopped near the village of Varennes by members of the 
National Guard, and was brought back to Paris. 

In September of 1791 the first Constitution of France was 
accepted, and the members of the National Assembly went 
home. On the first of October of the same year, the Legislative 

J 7 o 


THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


337 


Assembly came together to continue the work of the National 
Assembly. In this new gathering of popular representatives 
there were many extremely revolutionary elements. The bold¬ 
est among these were known as the Jacobins, after the old 
Jacobin cloister in which they held their political meetings. 
These young men (most of them belonging to the professional 
classes) made very violent speeches, and when the newspapers 
carried these orations to Berlin and Vienna, the king of Prus¬ 
sia and the emperor decided that they must do something to 
save their good brother and sister. They were very busy just 
then dividing the kingdom of Poland, where rival political 
factions had caused such a state of disorder that the country 
was at the mercy of anybody who wanted to take a couple of 
provinces. But they managed to send an army to invade 
France and deliver the king. 

Then a terrible panic of fear swept throughout the land 
of France. All the pent-up hatred of years of hunger and 
suffering came to a horrible climax. The mob of Paris stormed 
the palace of the Tuileries. The faithful Swiss bodyguards 
tried to defend their master, but Louis, unable to make up his 
mind, gave order to “cease firing” just when the crowd was 
retiring. The people, drunk with blood and noise and cheap 
wine, murdered the Swiss to the last man, then invaded the 
palace, and went after Louis, who had escaped into the meeting 
hall of the Assembly, where he was immediately suspended of 
his office, and from where he was taken as a prisoner to the 
old castle of the Temple. 

But the armies of Austria and Prussia continued their ad¬ 
vance and the panic changed into hysteria and turned men and 
women into wild beasts. In the first week of September of 
the year 1792, the crowd broke into the jails and murdered all 
the prisoners. The government did not interfere. The Jaco¬ 
bins, headed bv Danton, knew that this crisis meant either the 
success or the failure of the revolution, and that only the most 
brutal audacity could save them. The Legislative Assembly 
was closed and on the 21st of September of the year 1792 a 
new National Convention came together. It was a body com- 


338 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


posed almost entirely of extreme revolutionists. The king was 
formally accused of high treason and was brought before the 
Convention. He was found guilty and by a vote of 361 to 360 
(the extra vote being that of his cousin the Duke of Orleans) 
he was condemned to death. On the 21st of January of the 
year 1793, he quietly and with much dignity suffered himself 
to be taken to the scaffold. He had never understood what all 
the shooting and the fuss had been about. And he had been too 

proud to ask ques¬ 
tions. 

Then the Jacob¬ 
ins turned against 
the more moderate 
element in the 
Convention, the 
Girondists, called 
after their south¬ 
ern district, the 
Gironde. A spe¬ 
cial revolutionary 
tribunal was insti¬ 
tuted and twenty- 

%/ 

one of the leading 
Girondists were 
condemned to 
death. The others 
committed suicide. They were capable and honest men hut too 
philosophical and too moderate to survive during these fright¬ 
ful years. 

In October of the year 1793 the Constitution was suspended 
by the Jacobins “until peace should have been declared.” All 
power was placed in the hands of a small committee of Public 
Safety, with Danton and Robespierre as its leaders. The 
Christian religion and the old chronology were abolished. The 
“Age of Reason” (of which Thomas Paine had written so 
eloquently during the American Revolution) had come and 
with it the “Terror” which for more than a year killed good 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
INVADES HOLLAND 















THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 


339 


and bad and indifferent people at the rate of seventy or eighty 
a day. 

The autocratic rule of the king had been destroyed. It 
was succeeded by the tyranny of a few people who had such a 
passionate love for democratic virtue that they felt compelled 
to kill all those who disagreed with them. France was turned 
into a slaughterhouse. Everybody suspected everybody else. 
No one felt safe. Out of sheer fear, a few members of the old 
Convention, who knew that they were the next candidates for 
the scaffold, finally turned against Robespierre, who had al¬ 
ready decapitated most of his former colleagues. Robespierre, 
“the only true and pure Democrat,” tried to kill himself but 
failed. His shattered jaw was hastily bandaged and he was 
dragged to the guillotine. On the 27th of July of the year 
1794, the Reign of Terror came to an end, and all Paris 
danced with joy. 

The dangerous position of France, however, made it neces¬ 
sary that the government remain in the hands of a few strong 
men until the many enemies of the Revolution should have been 
driven from the soil of the French fatherland. While the 
half-clad and half-starved revolutionary armies fought their 
desperate battles of the Rhine and Italy and Belgium and 
Egypt, and defeated every one of the enemies of the Revolu¬ 
tion, five Directors were appointed, who ruled France for four 
years. Then the power was vested in the hands of a successful 
general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became 
“First Consul” of France in the year 1799. And during the 
next fifteen years the old European continent became the 
laboratory of a number of political experiments, the like of 
which the world had never seen before. 


NAPOLEON 


Napoleon was born in the year 1769, the third son of an 
honest notary public of the city of Ajaccio in the island of 
Corsica. He therefore was not a Frenchman, but an Italian 
whose native island (an old Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman 
colony in the Mediterranean Sea) had for years been strug¬ 
gling to regain its independence, first of all from the Genoese, 
and after the middle of the eighteenth century from the French, 
who had kindly offered to help the Corsicans in their struggle 
for freedom and had then occupied the island for their own 
benefit. 

During the first twenty years of his life, young Napoleon 
was a professional Corsican patriot—a Corsican Sinn Feiner, 
who hoped to deliver his beloved country from the yoke of the 
bitterly hated French enemy. But the French Revolution had 
unexpectedly recognized the claims of the Corsicans and gradu¬ 
ally Napoleon, who had received a good training at the military 
school of Brienne, drifted into the service of his adopted coun¬ 
try. Although he never learned to spell French correctly or 
to speak it without a broad Italian accent, lie became a French¬ 
man. In due time he came to stand as the highest expression 
of all French virtues. At present he is regarded as the symbol 
of the Gallic genius. 


Napoleon was what is called a fast worker. H is career 
does not cover more than twenty years. In that short span 
of time he fought more wars and gained more victories and 
marched more miles and conquered more square kilometers and 


340 








NAPOLEON 


341 


killed more people and brought about more reforms and gen¬ 
erally upset Europe to a greater extent than anybody (includ¬ 
ing Alexander the Great) had ever managed to do. 

He was a little fellow, and during the first years of his life 
his health was not very good. He never impressed anybody 
by his good looks and he remained to the end of his days very 
clumsy whenever he was obliged to appear at a social function. 
He did not enjoy a single advantage of breeding or birth or 
riches. For the greater part of his youth he was desperately 
poor and often he had to go without a meal or was obliged 
to make a few extra pennies in curious ways. 

He gave little promise as a literary genius. When he com¬ 
peted for a prize offered by the Academy of Lyons, his essay 
was found to be next to the last and he was number 15 out of 
16 candidates. But be overcame all these difficulties through 
his absolute and unshakable belief in his own destiny and in 
his own glorious future. Ambition was the mainspring of his 
life. The thought of self, the worship of that capital letter 
“N” with which he signed all his letters, and which recurred 
forever in the ornaments of his hastily constructed palaces, the 
absolute will to make the name Napoleon the most important 
thing in the world next to the name of God, these desires car¬ 
ried Napoleon to a pinnacle of fame which no other man has 
ever reached. 

When he was a half-pay lieutenant, young Bonaparte was 

very fond of the “Lives of Famous Men” which Plutarch, the 

•/ 

Greek historian, had written. But he never tried to live up 
to the high standard of character set by these heroes of the 
older days. Napoleon seems to have been devoid of all those 
considerate and thoughtful sentiments which make men dif¬ 
ferent from the animals. It will be very difficult to decide 
with any degree of accuracy whether he ever loved anyone 
besides himself. He kept a civil tongue to his mother, but 
she had the air and manners of a great lady and after the 
fashion of Italian mothers knew how to rule her brood of 
children and command their respect. For a few years he was 
fond of Josephine, his pretty Creole wife, who was the daugh- 


342 


T1IE STORY OF MANKIND 


ter of a French officer of Martinique and the widow of a soldier 
who had been executed hy Robespierre when he lost a battle 
against the Prussians. But the emperor divorced her when 
she failed to give him a son and heir and married the daughter 
of the Austrian emperor, because it seemed good policy. 

During the siege of Toulon, where he gained great fame 
as commander of a battery, Napoleon studied Macchiavelli 
with industrious care. He followed the advice of the Floren¬ 
tine statesman and never kept his word when it was to his 
advantage to break it. The word “gratitude” did not occur in 
his personal dictionary. Neither, to be quite fair, did he expect 
it from others. He was totally indifferent to human suffering. 
He executed prisoners of war (in Egypt in 1798) who had 
been promised their lives, and he quietly allowed his wounded 
in Sy ria to he chloroformed when he found it impossible to 
transport them to his ships. He ordered the Duke of Enghien 
to be condemned to death by a prej udiced court-martial and to 
be shot contrary to all law on the sole ground that the “Bour¬ 
bons needed a warning.” He decreed that those German of¬ 
ficers who were made prisoner while fighting for their country’s 
independence should he shot against the nearest wall, and when 
Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero, fell into his hands after a 
most heroic resistance, he was executed like a common traitor. 

In short, when we study the character of the emperor, we 
begin to understand those anxious British mothers who used 
to drive their children to bed with the threat that “Bonaparte, 
who ate little hoys and girls for breakfast, would come and get 
them if they were not very good.” And yet, having said these 
many unpleasant things about this strange tyrant, who looked 
after every other department of his army with the utmost care 
but neglected the medical service, and who ruined his uniforms 
with Eau de Cologne because he could not stand the smell of 
his poor sweating soldiers; having said all these unpleasant 
things and being fully prepared to add many more, I must 
confess to a certain lurking feeling of doubt. 

Here I am sitting at a comfortable table loaded heavily 
with books, with one eye on my typewriter and the other on 


NAPOLEON 


343 


Licorice the cat, who has a great fondness for carbon paper, 
and I am telling you that the Emperor Napoleon was a most 
contemptible person. But should I happen to look out of 
the window, down upon Seventh Avenue, and should the end¬ 
less procession of trucks and carts come to a sudden halt, and 
should I hear the sound of the heavy drums and see the little 
man on his white horse in his old and much-worn green uni¬ 
form, then I don’t know, but I am afraid that I would leave 
my books and the kitten and my home and everything else to 
follow him wherever he cared to lead. My own grandfather 
did this and Heaven knows he was not born to be a hero. 
Millions of other people’s grandfathers did it. They received 
no reward, but they expected none. They cheerfully gave legs 
and arms and lives to serve this foreigner, who took them a 
thousand miles away from their homes and marched them into 
a barrage of Russian or English or Spanish or Italian or 
Austrian cannon and stared quietly into space while they were 
rolling in the agony of death. 

If you ask me for an explanation, I must answer that I 
have none. I can only guess at one of the reasons. Napoleon 
was the greatest of actors and the whole European continent 
was his stage. At all times and under all circumstances he 
knew the precise attitude that would impress the spectators 
most and he understood what words would make the deepest 
impression. Whether he spoke in the Egyptian desert, before 
the backdrop of the Sphinx and the pyramids, or addressed 
his shivering men on the dew-soaked plains of Italy, made no 
difference. At all times he was master of the situation. Even 
at the end, an exile on a little rock in the middle of the Atlantic, 
a sick man at the mercy of a dull and intolerable British gov¬ 
ernor, he held the centre of the stage. 

After the defeat of Waterloo, no one outside of a few 
trusted friends ever saw the great emperor. The people of 
Europe knew that he was living on the island of St. Helena— 
they knew that a British garrison guarded him day and night 
—they knew that the British fleet guarded the garrison which 
guarded the emperor on his farm at Longwood. But he was 



344 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


never out of the mind of either friend or enemy. When illness 
and despair had at last taken him away, his silent eyes contin¬ 
ued to haunt the world. Even to-day he is as much of a force 
in the life of France as a hundred years ago when people 
fainted at the mere sight of this sallow-faced man who stabled 
his horses in the holiest temples of the Russian Kremlin, and 
who treated the pope and the mighty ones of this earth as if 
they were his lackevs. 

To give you a mere outline of his life would demand a 
couple of volumes. To tell you of his great political reform 
of the French state, of his new codes of laws which were 
adopted in most European countries, of his activities in every 
field of public activity, would take thousands of pages. But 
I can explain in a few words why he was so successful during 
the first part of his career and why he failed during the last 
ten years. From the year 1789 until the year 1804, Napoleon 
was the great leader of the French Revolution. He was not 
merely fighting for the glory of his own name. He defeated 
Austria and Italy and England and Russia because he, him¬ 
self, and his soldiers were the apostles of the new creed of 
“Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” and were the enemies of 
the courts while they were the friends of the people. 

But in the year 1804 Napoleon made himself hereditary 
emperor of the French and sent for Pope Pius VII to come 
and crown him, even as Leo III in the vear 800 had crowned 
that other great King of the Franks, Charlemagne, whose ex¬ 
ample was constantly before Napoleon's eyes. 

Once upon the throne, the old revolutionary chieftain be¬ 
came an unsuccessful imitation of a Habshurg monarch. He 
forgot his spiritual mother, the political club of the Jacobins. 
He ceased to be the defender of the oppressed. He became the 
chief of all the oppressors and kept his shooting squads ready 
to execute those who dared to oppose his imperial will. No 
one had shed a tear when in the year 1806 the sad remains of 
the Holy Roman Empire were carted to the historical dustbin 
and when the last relic of ancient Roman glory was destroyed 
by the grandson of an Italian peasant. But when the Napo- 


NAPOLEON 


345 


leonic armies had invaded Spain, had forced the Spaniards to 
recognize a king whom they detested, had massacred the poor 
Madrilenes who remained faithful to their old rulers, then pub¬ 
lic opinion turned against the former hero of Marengo and 
Austerlitz and a hundred other revolutionary battles. Then 
and only then, when Napoleon was no longer the hero of the 
Revolution but the personification of all the had traits of the 
old regime, was it possible for England to give direction to 
the fast-spreading sentiment of hatred which was turning all 
honest men into enemies of the French emperor. 

The English people from the very beginning had felt 
deeply disgusted when their newspapers told them the grue¬ 
some details of the Terror. They had staged their own great 
revolution (during the reign of Charles I) a century before. 
It had been a very simple affair compared to the upheaval of 
Paris. In the eyes of the average Englishman a Jacobin was 
a monster to be shot at sight and Napoleon was the chief devil. 
The British fleet had blockaded France ever since the year 
1798. It had spoiled Napoleon’s plan to invade India by way 
of Egypt and had forced him to heat an ignominious retreat 
after his victories along the banks of the Nile. And finally, 
in the year 1805, England got the chance it had waited for so 
long. 

Near Cape Trafalgar on the southwestern coast of Spain, 
Nelson annihilated the Napoleonic fleet, beyond a possible 
chance of recovery. From that moment on, the emperor was 
landlocked. Even so, he would have been able to maintain 
himself as the recognized ruler of the continent had he under¬ 
stood the signs of the times and accepted the honorable peace 
which the powers offered him. But Napoleon had been blinded 
by the blaze of his own glory. lie would recognize no equals. 
He could tolerate no rivals. And his hatred turned against 
Russia, the mysterious land of the endless plains with its inex¬ 
haustible supply of cannon fodder. 

As Iona' as Russia was ruled by Paul I, the half-witted son 
of Catherine the Great, Napoleon had known how to deal with 
the situation. But Paul grew more and more irresponsible 


346 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


until his exasperated subjects were obliged to murder him 
(lest they all be sent to the Siberian lead mines), and the son of 
Paul, the Emperor Alexander, did not share his father’s affec¬ 
tion for the usurper whom he regarded as the enemy of man¬ 
kind, the eternal disturber of the peace. He was a pious man 
who believed that he had been chosen by God to deliver the 
world from the Corsican curse. He joined Prussia and Eng¬ 
land and Austria and he was defeated. He tried five times 
and five times he failed. In the year 1812 he once more taunted 



THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW 

Napoleon until the French emperor, in a blind rage, vowed 
that he would dictate peace in Moscow. Then, from far and 
wide, from Spain and Germany and Holland and Italy and 
Portugal, unwilling regiments were driven northward, that the 
wounded pride of the great emperor might be duly avenged. 

The rest of the story is common knowledge. After a march 
of two months Napoleon reached the Russian capital and es¬ 
tablished his headquarters in the holy Kremlin. On the night 
of September 15 of the year 1812, Moscow caught fire. The 
town burned four days. When the evening of the fifth day 















NAPOLEON 


347 


came, Napoleon gave the order for the retreat. Two weeks 
later it began to snow. The army trudged through mud and 
sleet until November the 2Gth, when the River Berezina was 
reached. Then the Russian attacks began in all seriousness. 
The Cossacks swarmed around the “Grande Armee,” which 
was no longer an army but a mob. In the middle of December 
the first of the survivors began to be seen in the German cities 
of the east. 

Then there were many rumors of an impending revolt. 
“The time has come,” the people of Europe said, “to free our¬ 
selves from this insufferable yoke.” And they began to look 
for old shotguns which had escaped the eye of the ever-present 
French spies. But ere they knew what had happened, Napo¬ 
leon was back with a new army. He had left his defeated sol¬ 
diers and in his little sleigh had rushed ahead to Paris, making 
a final appeal for more troops that he might defend the sacred 
soil of France against foreign invasion. 

Children of sixteen and seventeen followed him when he 
moved eastward to meet the allied powers. On October 16, 
18, and 19 of the year 1818, the terrible battle of Leipzig took 
place, where for three days boys in green and boys in blue 
fought each other until the Elster ran red with blood. On the 
afternoon of the 17th of October, the massed reserves of Rus¬ 
sian infantry broke through the French lines and Napoleon 
fled. 

Back to Paris he went. He abdicated in favor of his small 
son, but the allied powers insisted that Louis XVIII, the 
brother of the late King Louis XVI, should occupy the French 
throne, and, surrounded by Cossacks and Uhlans, the dull-eyed 
Bourbon prince made his triumphal entry into Paris. 

As for Napoleon, he was made the sovereign ruler of the 
little island of Elba in the Mediterranean, where he organized 
his stableboys into a miniature army and fought battles on a 
chess board. 

But no sooner had he left France than the people began 
to realize what they had lost. The last twenty years, however 
costly, had been a period of great glory. Paris had been the 


348 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


capital of the world. The fat Bourbon king who had learned 
nothing and had forgotten nothing during the days of his 
exile disgusted everybody by his indolence. 

On the first of March of the year 1815, when the repre¬ 
sentatives of the allies were ready to begin the work of un¬ 
scrambling the map of Europe, Napoleon suddenly landed near 
Cannes. In less than a week the French army had deserted 



THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO 

the Bourbons and had rushed southward to offer their swords 
and bayonets to the “little corporal.” Napoleon marched 
straight to Paris, where he arrived on the twentieth of March. 
This time he was more cautious. He offered peace, hut the 
allies insisted upon war. The whole of Europe arose against 
the “perfidious Corsican.” Rapidly the emperor marched 
northward that he might crush his enemies before they should 
be able to unite their forces. But Napoleon was no longer his 











NAPOLEON 


349 


old self. He felt sick. He got tired easily. He slept when he 
ought to have been up directing the attack of his advance 
guard. Besides, he missed many of his faithful old generals. 
They were dead. 

Early in June his armies entered Belgium. On the 16th 
of that month lie defeated the Prussians under Bliicher. But 
a subordinate commander failed to destroy the retreating army 
as he had been ordered to do. 

Two davs later Napoleon met Wellington near Waterloo. 
It was the 18th of June, a Sunday. At two o’clock of the 
afternoon, the battle seemed won for the French. At three a 
speck of dust appeared upon the eastern horizon. Napoleon 
believed that this meant the approach of his own cavalry, who 
would now turn the English defeat into a rout. At four o’clock 
lie knew better. Cursing and swearing, old Bliicher drove 
his deathly tired troops into the heart of the fray. The shock 
broke the ranks of the guards. Napoleon had no further re¬ 
serves. He told his men to save themselves as best they could, 
and he fled. 

For a second time, he abdicated in favor of his son. Just 
one hundred days after his escape from Elba, he was making 
for the coast. He intended to go to America. In the year 
1803, for a mere song, he had sold the French colony of 
Louisiana (which was in great danger of being captured by 
the English) to the young American republic. “The Ameri¬ 
cans,” so he said, “will be grateful and will give me a little bit 
of land and a house where I may spend the last days of my life 
in peace and quiet.” But the English fleet was watching all 
French harbors. Caught between the armies of the allies 
and the ships of the British, Napoleon had no choice. The 
Prussians intended to shoot him. The English might be more 
generous. At Rochefort he waited in the hope that something 
might turn up. One month after Waterloo, he received orders 
from the new French government to leave French soil inside 
of twenty-four hours. Always the tragedian, he wrote a letter 
to the prince regent of England (George III, the king, was 
in an insane asylum) informing His Royal Highness of his 


350 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


intention to “throw himself upon the mercy of his enemies and, 
like Themistocles, to look for a welcome at the fireside of his 
foes ...” 

On the 15th of July he went on board the Selleroplion, 
and surrendered his sword to Admiral Hotham. At Plymouth 
he was transferred to the Northumberland, which carried him 
to St. Helena. There he spent the last seven years of his 
life. He tried to write his memoirs, he quarreled with his 
keepers, and he dreamed of past times. Curiously enough, he 
returned (at least in his imagination) to his original point of 
departure. He remembered the days when he had fought the 



battles of the Revolution. He tried to convince himself that 
he had always been the true friend of those great principles of 
“Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” which the ragged soldiers 
of the Convention had carried to the ends of the earth. He 
liked to dwell upon his career as commander-in-chief and 
consul. He rarely spoke of the empire. Sometimes he 
thought of his son, the Duke of Reichstadt, the little eagle, 
who lived in Vienna, where he was treated as a “poor relation” 
by his young Habsburg cousins, whose fathers had trembled at 
the mention of his very name. When the end came, he was 
leading his troops to victory. He ordered Ney to attack with 
the guards. Then he died. 













NAPOLEON 


35! 


But if you want an explanation of this strange career, if 
you really wish to know how one man could possibly rule so 
many people for so many years by the sheer force of his will, 
do not read the books that have been written about him. Their 
authors either hated the emperor or loved him. You will 
learn many facts, but it is more important to “feel history” 
than to know it. Don’t read, but wait until you have a chance 
to hear a good artist sing the song called “The Two Grena¬ 
diers.” The words were written by Heine, the great German 
poet who lived through the Napoleonic era. The music was 
composed by Schumann, a German who saw the emperor, 
the enemy of his country, whenever he came to visit his im¬ 
perial father-in-law. The song therefore is the work of two 
men who had every reason to hate the tyrant. 

Go and hear it. Then you will understand what a thousand 
volumes could not possibly tell you. 


THE HOLY ALLIANCE 


The Imperial Highnesses, the Royal Highnesses, their 
Graces the Dukes, the Ministers Extraordinary and Plenipo¬ 
tentiary, together with the plain Excellencies and their army 
of secretaries, servants, and hangers-on, whose labors had been 
so rudely interrupted by the sudden return of the terrible 
Corsican (now sweltering under the hot sun of St. Helena), 
went back to their jobs. The victory was duly celebrated with 
dinners, garden parties, and balls at which the new and very 
shocking “waltz” was danced to the great scandal of the ladies 
and gentlemen who remembered the minuet of the old regime. 

For almost a generation they had lived in retirement. At 
last the danger was over. They were very eloquent upon the 
subject of the terrible hardships which they had suffered. And 
they expected to he recompensed for every penny they had 
lost at the hands of the unspeakable Jacobins, who had dared 
to kill their anointed king, who had abolished wigs, and who 
had discarded the short trousers of the court of Versailles for 
the ragged pantaloons of the Parisian slums. 

You may think it absurd that I should mention such a 
detail. But, if you please, the Congress of Vienna was one 
long succession of such absurdities and for many months the 
question of “short trousers vs. long trousers” interested the 
delegates more than the future settlement of the Saxon or 
Spanish problems. His Majesty the King of Prussia went so 
far as to order a pair of short ones, that he might give public 
evidence of his contempt for everything revolutionary. 


352 








OFF FOR TRAFALGAR 


















354 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Another German potentate, not to be outdone in this noble 
hatred for the revolution, decreed that all taxes which his sub¬ 
jects had paid to the French usurper should be paid a second 
time to the legitimate ruler who had loved his people from afar 
while they were at the mercy of the Corsican ogre. And so on 
from one blunder to another, until one gasps and exclaims, 
“But why in the name of High Heaven did not the people 
object?” Why not indeed? Because the people were utterly 
exhausted, were desperate, did not care what happened or how 
or where or by whom they were ruled, provided there was 
peace. They were sick and tired of war and revolution and 
reform. 

In the ’eighties of the previous century they had all danced 
around the tree of liber tv. Princes had embraced their cooks 
and duchesses had danced the Carmagnole with their lackeys 
in the honest belief that the millennium of equality and fra¬ 
ternity had at last dawned upon this wicked world. Instead of 
the millennium they had been visited by the revolutionary com¬ 
missary who had lodged a dozen dirty soldiers in their parlor 
and had stolen the family plate. 

When they had heard how the last outbreak of revolution¬ 
ary disorder in Paris had been suppressed by a young officer, 
called Bonaparte or Buonaparte, who had turned his guns 
upon the mob, they gave a sigh of relief. A little less liberty, 
fraternity, and equality seemed a very desirable thing. But ere 
long, the young officer called Buonaparte or Bonaparte be¬ 
came one of the three consuls of the French republic, then sole 
consul, and finally emperor. As he was much more efficient 
than any ruler that had ever been seen before, his hand pressed 
heavily upon his poor subjects. He showed them no mercy. 
He impressed their sons into his armies, he married their daugh¬ 
ters to his generals, and he took their pictures and their statues 
to enrich his own museums. He turned the whole of Europe 
into an armed camp and killed almost an entire generation of 
men. 

Now he was gone, and the people (except a few profes¬ 
sional military men) had but one wish. They wanted to be let 


THE HOLY ALLIANCE 


355 


alone. For awhile they had been allowed to rule themselves, to 
vote for mayors and aldermen and judges. The system had 
been a terrible failure. The new rulers had been inexperienced 
and extravagant. From sheer despair the people turned to 



THE SPECTRE WHICH FRIGHTENED THE HOLY ALLIANCE 













356 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the representative men of the old regime. “You rule us,” they 
said, “as you used to do. Tell us what we owe you for taxes 
and leave us alone. We are busy repairing the damage of the 
age of liberty.” 

The men who stage-managed the famous Congress cer¬ 
tainly did their best to satisfy this longing for rest and quiet. 
The Holy Alliance, the main result of the Congress, made the 
policeman the most important dignitary of the state and held 
out the most terrible punishment to those who dared criticize a 
single official act. 

Europe had peace, but it was the peace of the cemetery. 

The three most important men at Vienna were the Em¬ 
peror Alexander of Russia; Metternich, who represented the 
interests of the Austrian House of Habsburg; and Talleyrand, 
the erstwhile bishop of Autun, who had managed to live 
through the different changes in the French government by 
the sheer force of his cunning and his intelligence and who 
now traveled to the Austrian capital to save for his country 
whatever could be saved from the Napoleonic ruin. Like the 
gay young man of the limerick, who never knew when he was 
slighted, this unbidden guest came to the party and ate just as 
heartily as if he had been really invited. Indeed, before long 
he was sitting at the head of the table entertaining everybody 
with his amusing stories and gaining the company’s good will 
by the charm of his manner. 

Before he had been in Vienna twenty-four hours he knew 
that the allies were divided into two hostile camps. On the 
one side were Russia, who wanted to take Poland, and Prussia, 
who wanted to annex Saxony; and on the other side were 
Austria and England, who were trying to prevent this grab 
because it was against their own interest that either Prussia or 
Russia should be able to dominate Europe. Talleyrand played 
the two sides against each other with great skill, and it was due 
to his efforts that the French people were not made to suffer 
for the ten years of oppression which Europe had endured at 
the hands of the imperial officials. He argued that the French 
people had been given no choice in the matter. Napoleon had 


THE HOLY ALLIANCE 


357 


forced them to act at his bidding. But Napoleon was gone and 
Louis XVIII was on the throne. ‘'Give him a chance,” Talley- 
rand pleaded. And the allies, glad to see a legitimate king 
upon the throne of a revolutionary country, obligingly yielded 
and the Bourbons were given their chance, of which they made 
such use that they were driven out after fifteen years. 

The second man of the triumvirate of Vienna was Metter- 
nich, the Austrian prime minister, the leader of the foreign 
policy of the House of Habsburg. He was a very handsome 
gentleman with very fine manners, immensely rich, and very 
able, but the product of a society which lived a thousand miles 
away from the sweating multitudes who worked and slaved in 
the cities and on the farms. As a young man, Metternich had 
been studying at the University of Strassburg when the French 
Revolution broke out. Strassburg, the city which gave birth 
to the Marseillaise, had been a centre of Jacobin activities. 
Metternich remembered that his pleasant social life had been 
sadly interrupted, that a lot of incompetent citizens had sud¬ 
denly been called forth to perform tasks for which they were 
not fit, that the mob had celebrated the dawn of the new liberty 
by the murder of perfectly innocent persons. He had failed to 
see the honest enthusiasm of the masses, the ray of hope in the 
eyes of women and children who carried bread and water to 
the ragged troops of the Convention, marching through the 
city on their way to the front and a glorious death for the 
French fatherland. 

The whole thing had filled the young Austrian with dis¬ 
gust. It was uncivilized. If there were any fighting to be done 
it must be done by dashing young men in lovely uniforms, 
charging across the green fields on well-groomed horses. But 
to turn an entire country into an evil-smelling armed camp 
where tramps were overnight promoted to be generals, that was 
both wicked and senseless. ‘‘See what came of all your fine 
ideas,” he would say to the French diplomats whom he met at 
a quiet little dinner given by one of the innumerable Austrian 
granddukes. “You wanted liberty, equality, and fraternity and 
you got Napoleon. How much better it would have been if 


358 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


you had been contented with the existing order of things.” 
And he would explain his system of “stability.” He would 
advocate a return to the normalcy of the good old days before 
the war, when everybody was happy and nobody talked non¬ 
sense about “everybody being as good as everybody else.” In 
this attitude he was entirely sincere, and as he was an able man 



THE REAL CONGRESS OF VIENNA 


of great strength of will and a tremendous power of persuasion 
he was one of the most dangerous enemies of the revolutionary 
ideas. He did not die until the year 1859, and he therefore 
lived long enough to see the complete failure of all his policies 
when they were swept aside by the revolution of the year 1848. 
He then found himself the most hated man of Europe and 
more than once ran the risk of being lynched by angry crowds 














THE HOLY ALLIANCE 


359 


of outraged citizens. But until the very last, he remained stead¬ 
fast in his belief that he had done the right thing. 

He had always been convinced that people preferred peace 
to liberty, and he had tried to give them what was best for them. 
And in all fairness, it ought to he said that his efforts to estab¬ 
lish universal peace were fairly successful. The great powers 
did not fly at one another’s throats for almost forty years, in¬ 
deed not until the Crimean War between Russia on the one 
side, and Turkey, England, France, and Sardinia on the other; 
which took place in the year 1854. That means a record for the 
European continent. 

The third hero of this waltzing congress was the Emperor 
Alexander. He had been brought up at the court of his grand¬ 
mother, the famous Catherine the Great. Between the lessons 
of this shrewd old woman, who taught him to regard the glory 
of Russia as the most important thing in life, and those of his 
private tutor, a Swiss admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau, who 
filled his mind with a general love of humanity, the boy grew 
up to he a strange mixture of a selfish tyrant and a sentimental 
revolutionist. He had suffered great indignities during the 
life of his crazy father, Paul I. He had been obliged to wit¬ 
ness the wholesale slaughter of the Napoleonic battlefields. 
Then the tide had turned. His armies had won the day for the 
allies. Russia had become the savior of Europe and the tsar 
of this mighty people was acclaimed as a half-god who would 
cure the world of its many ills. 

But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know 
men and women as Talleyrand and Metternich knew them. 
He did not understand this strange game of diplomacy. He 
was vain (who would not be under the circumstances?) and 
loved to hear the applause of the multitude. Soon he had 
become the main ‘'attraction” of the Congress, while Metter¬ 
nich and Talleyrand and Castlereagh (the very able British 
representative) sat around a table and drank a bottle of Tokay 
and decided what was actually going to he done. They needed 
Russia and therefore they were very polite to Alexander, hut 
the less he had personally to do with the actual work of the 


3G0 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Congress, the better they were pleased. They even encouraged 
his plans for a Holy Alliance that he might be fully occupied 
while they were engaged upon the work at hand. 

Alexander was a sociable person who liked to go to parties 
and meet people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay. 
But there was a very different element in his character. He 
tried to forget something which he could not forget. On the 
night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801 he had been sitting 
in a room of the St. Michael palace in Petersburg, waiting for 
the news of his father’s abdication. But Paul had refused to 
sign the document which the drunken officers had placed be¬ 
fore him on the table, and in their rage they had put a scarf 
around his neck and had strangled him to death. Then they 
had gone downstairs to tell Alexander that he was emperor of 
$11 the Russian lands. 

The memory of this terrible night stayed with the tsar, 
who was a very sensitive person. He had been educated in 
the school of the great French philosopher who did not be¬ 
lieve in God hut in Human Reason. But reason alone could 
not satisfy the emperor in his predicament. He began to 
hear voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which 
he could square himself with his conscience. He became very 
pious and began to take an interest in mysticism, that strange 
love of the mysterious and the unknown which is as old as the 
temples of Thebes and Babylon. 

The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era 
had influenced the character of the people of that day in a 
strange way. Men and women who had lived through twenty 
years of anxiety and fear were no longer quite normal. They 
jumped whenever the doorbell rang. It might mean the news 
of the “death on the field of honor” of an onlv son. The 
phrases about “brotherly love” and “liberty” of the Revolu¬ 
tion were hollow words in the ears of sorely stricken peasants. 
They clung to anything that might give them a new hold on 
the terrible problems of life. In their grief and misery they 
were easily imposed upon by a large number of impostors 
who posed as prophets and preached a strange new doctrine 


THE HOLY ALLIANCE 


361 


which they dug out of the more obscure passages of the Book 
of Revelations. 

I do not want you to think of the Holy Alliance as a piece 
of paper which was signed in the year 1815 and lies dead and 
forgotten somewhere in the archives of state. It may be for¬ 
gotten, but it is bv no means dead. The IIolv Alliance was 
directly responsible for the promulgation of the Monroe 
Doctrine, and the Monroe Doctrine of America for the Ameri¬ 
cans has a very distinct bearing upon your own life. 

But France and England and Austria depended upon the 
good-will of Russia. They could not afford to offend Alex¬ 
ander. And while they regarded the Holy Alliance as utter 
rubbish and not worth the paper upon which it was written, 
they listened patiently to the tsar when he read them the first 
rough draft of his attempt to create a Brotherhood of Men 
upon a basis of the Holy Scriptures. For this is what the 
Holy Alliance tried to do, and the signers of the document 
solemnly declared that they would “in the administration of 
their respective states and in their political relations with every 
other government take for their sole guide the precepts of that 
Holy Religion, namely the precepts of Justice, Christian 
Charity, and Peace.” They then proceeded to promise each 
other that they would remain united “by the bonds of a true 
and indissoluble fraternity, and considering each other as 
fellow-countrymen, they would on all occasions and in all places 
lend each other aid and assistance.” 

Eventually the Holy Alliance was signed by the emperor 
of Austria, who did not understand a word of it. It was signed 
by the Bourbons, who needed the friendship of Napoleon’s old 
enemies. It was signed by the king of Prussia, who hoped to 
gain Alexander for his plans for a “greater Prussia,” and by 
all the little nations of Europe who were at the mercy of Rus¬ 
sia. England never signed, because Castlereagh thought the 
whole thing buncombe. The pope did not sign, because lie 
resented this interference in his business by a Greek-Orthodox 
and a Protestant. And the sultan did not sign, because he 
never heard of it. 


362 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


The general mass of the European people, however, soon 
were foreed to take notice. Behind the hollow phrases of the 
Holy Alliance stood the armies of the Quintuple Alliance 
which Metternich had created among the great powers. These 
armies meant business. They let it be known that the peace 
of Europe must not be disturbed by the so-called liberals, who 
were in reality nothing but disgusted Jacobins and hoped for 
a return of the revolutionary days. The enthusiasm for the 
great wars of liberation of the years 1812, 1813, 1814, and 
1815 had begun to wear off. It had been followed by a sincere 
belief in the coming of a happier day. The soldiers who had 
borne the brunt of the battle wanted peace and they said so. 

But they did not want the sort of peace which the Holy 
Alliance and the Council of the European powers had now 
bestowed upon them. They cried that they had been betrayed. 
But they were careful lest they he heard by a secret-police spy. 
The reaction was victorious. It was a reaction caused by men 
who sincerely believed that their methods were necessary for 
the good of humanity. But it was just as hard to bear as if 
their intentions had been less kind. And it caused a great deal 
of unnecessary suffering and greatly retarded the orderly 
progress of political development. 


THE GREAT REACTION 


To undo the damage done by the great Napoleonic flood 
was impossible. Age-old fences had been washed away. The 
palaces of two score dynasties had been damaged to such 
an extent that they had to be condemned as uninhabitable. 
Other royal residences had been greatly enlarged at the ex¬ 
pense of less fortunate neighbors. Strange odds and ends 
of revolutionary doctrine had been left behind by the receding 
waters and could not be dislodged without danger to the entire 
community. But the political engineers of the Congress did 
the best they could and this is what they accomplished. 

France had disturbed the peace of the world for so many 
years that people had come to fear that country almost in¬ 
stinctively. The Bourbons, through the mouth of Talleyrand, 
had promised to be good, hut the Hundred Days had taught 
Europe what to expect should Napoleon manage to escape for 
a second time. The Dutch republic, therefore, was changed 
into a kingdom, and Belgium (which had not joined the Dutch 
struggle for independence in the sixteenth century and since 
then had been part of the Habsburg domains, first under Span¬ 
ish rule and thereafter under Austrian rule) was made part 
of this new kingdom of The Netherlands. Nobody wanted this 
union either in the Protestant North or in the Catholic South, 
but no questions were asked. It seemed good for the peace 
of Europe and that was the main consideration. 

Poland had hoped for great things because a Pole, Prince 
Adam Czartoryski, was one of the most intimate friends of 


363 













364 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Tsar Alexander and had been his constant adviser during the 
war and at the Congress of Vienna. But Poland was made a 
semi-independent part of Russia with Alexander as her king. 
This solution pleased no one and caused much bitter feeling 
and three revolutions. 

Denmark, which had remained a faithful ally of Napoleon 
until the end, was severely punished. Seven years before, an 
English fleet had sailed down the Kattegat and without a 
declaration of war or any warning had bombarded Copenhagen 
and had taken away the Danish fleet, lest it be of value to 

%j 7 

Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna went one step further. 
It took Norway (which since the year 1379 had been united 
with Denmark) away from Denmark and gave it to Charles 
XIV of Sweden as a reward for his betrayal of Napoleon, 
who had set him up in the king business. This Swedish king, 
curiously enough, was a former French general by the name 
of Bernadotte, who had come to Sweden as one of Naj^oleon’s 
adjutants, and had been invited to the throne of that good 
country when the last of the rulers of the House of Hollstein- 
Gottorp had died without leaving either son or daughter. From 
1815 to 1844 he ruled his adopted country (the language of 
which he never learned) with great ability. He was a clever 
man and enjoyed the respect of both his Swedish and his Nor¬ 
wegian subjects, but he did not succeed in joining two countries 
which nature and history had put asunder. The dual Scandi¬ 
navian state was never a success, and in 1905 Norway, in a 

7 7 

most peaceful and orderly manner, set up as an independent 
kingdom, and the Swedes bade her “good speed’’ and very 
wisely let her go her own way. 

The Italians, who since the days of the Renaissance had 


been at the mercy of a long series of invaders, also had put 
great hopes in General Bonaparte. The Emperor Napoleon, 
however, had grievously disappointed them. Instead of the 
United Italy which the people wanted, they had been divided 
into a number of little principalities, duchies, republics, and 
the Papal State, which (next to Naples) was the worst gov¬ 
erned and most miserable region of the entire peninsula. The 


THE GREAT REACTION 


365 


Congress of Vienna abolished a few of the Napoleonic repub¬ 
lics and in their place resurrected several old principalities, 
which were given to deserving members, both male and female, 
of the Hapsburg family. 

The poor Spaniards, who had started the great revolt 
against Napoleon and who had sacrificed the best blood of the 
country for their king, were punished severely when the 
Congress allowed His Majesty to return to his domains. This 
vicious creature, known as Ferdinand VII, had spent the last 
four years as a prisoner of Napoleon. He had improved his 
days by knitting garments for the statues of his favorite patron 
saints. He celebrated bis return by reintroducing the In¬ 
quisition and the torture-chamber, both of which had been 
abolished by the Revolution. He was a disgusting person, de¬ 
spised as much by his subjects as by bis four wives, but the 
Holy Alliance maintained him upon his throne and all efforts 
of the decent Spaniards to get rid of this curse and make Spain 
a constitutional kingdom ended in bloodshed and executions. 

Portugal had been without a king since the year 1807 when 
the royal family had fled to the colonies in Brazil. The coun¬ 
try had been used as a base of supply for the armies of 
Wellington during the Peninsular War, which lasted from 
1808 until 1814. After 1815 Portugal continued to be a sort of 
British province until the House of Braganza returned to the 
throne, leaving one of its members behind in Rio de Janeiro 
as emperor of Brazil, the only American empire which lasted 
for more than a few years, and which came to an end in 1889 
when the country became a republic. 

In the East nothing was done to improve the terrible con¬ 
ditions of both the Slavs and the Greeks, who were still sub¬ 
jects of the sultan. In the year 1804 Black George, a Servian 
swineherd, had started a revolt against the Turks, but he had 
been defeated by his enemies and murdered by one of his sup¬ 
posed friends, the rival Servian leader; and the Turks had 
continued to be the undisputed masters of the Balkans. 

The Greeks, who since the loss of their independence, two 
thousand years before, had been subjects of the Macedonians, 


666 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the Romans, the Venetians, and the Turks, had hoped that 
something would he done for them. But the Congress of 
Vienna was not interested in Greeks, but was very much inter- 
ested in keeping all “legitimate” monarchs, Christian, Moslem, 
and otherwise, upon their respective thrones. Therefore noth¬ 
ing was done. 

The last hut perhaps the greatest blunder of the Congress 
was the treatment of Germany. The Reformation and the 
Thirty Years War had not only destroyed the prosperity of the 
country, but had turned it into a hopeless i^olitical rubbish 
heap, consisting of a couple of kingdoms, a few grand-duchies, 
a large number of duchies, and hundreds of margravates, prin¬ 
cipalities, baronies, electorates, free cities, and free villages, 
ruled hv the strangest assortment of potentates that was ever 
seen off the comic opera stage. Frederick the Great had 
changed this when he created a strong Prussia, hut this state 
had not survived him by many years. 

Napoleon had blue-penciled the demand for independence 
of most of these little countries, and only fifty-two out of a 
total of more than three hundred had survived the year 1806. 
During the years of the great struggle for independence, many 
a young soldier had dreamed of a new Fatherland that should 
he strong and united. But there can be no union without a 
strong leadership, and who was to be this leader? 

There were five kingdoms in the German-speaking lands. 
The rulers of two of these, Austria and Prussia, were kings bv 

o %/ 

the grace of God. The rulers of three others, Bavaria, Saxony, 
and Wurtemberg, were kings by the grace of Napoleon, and 
as they had been the faithful henchmen of the emperor, their 
patriotic credit with the other Germans was therefore not very 
good. 

The Congress had established a new German Confedera¬ 
tion, a league of thirty-eight sovereign states, under the chair¬ 
manship of the king of Austria, who was now known as the 
emperor of Austria. It was the sort of makeshift arrange¬ 
ment which satisfied no one. It is true that a German diet, 
which met in the old coronation city of Frankfort, had been 


THE GREAT REACTION 


367 


created to discuss matters of “common policy and importance.” 
But in this diet thirty-eight delegates represented thirty-eight 
different interests and, as no decision could he taken without a 
unanimous vote (a parliamentary rule which had in previous 
centuries ruined the mighty kingdom of Poland), the famous 
German Confederation became very soon the laughingstock 
of Europe and the politics of the old empire began to resemble 
those of our Central American neighbors in the ’forties and 
the ’fifties of the last century. 

It was terribly humiliating to the people who had sacrificed 
everything for a national ideal. But the Congress was not 
interested in the private feelings of “subjects,” and the debate 
was closed. 

Did anybody object? Most assuredly. As soon as the first 
feeling of hatred against Napoleon had quieted down—as soon 
as the enthusiasm of the great war had subsided—as soon as 
the people came to a full realization of the crime that had been 
committed in the name of “peace and stability,” they began to 
murmur. They even made threats of open revolt. But what 
could they do? They were powerless. They were at the mercy 
of the most pitiless and efficient police system the world had 
ever seen. 

The members of the Congress of Vienna honestly and sin¬ 
cerely believed that “the revolutionary principle had led to the 
criminal usurpation of the throne by the former emperor 
Napoleon.” They felt that they were called upon to eradicate 
the adherents of the so-called “French ideas,” just as Philip II 
had only followed the voice of his conscience when he burned 
Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the six¬ 
teenth century a man who did not believe in the divine right 
of the pope to rule his subjects as he saw fit was a “heretic,” 
and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to kill him. In the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, on the continent of Eu¬ 
rope, a man who did not believe in the divine right of his king to 
rule him as he or his prime minister saw fit was a “heretic,” and 
it was the duty of all loyal citizens to denounce him to the near¬ 
est policeman and see that he got punished. 




368 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Blit the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in 
the school of Napoleon and they performed their task much 
better than it had been done in the year 1517. The period 
between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was the great era of 
the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in pal¬ 
aces and they were to he found in the lowest gin-shops. They 
peeped through the keyholes of the ministerial cabinets and 
they listened to the conversation of the people who were taking 
the air on the benches of the municipal park. They guarded 
the frontier so that no one might leave without a duly vised 
passport, and they inspected all packages, that no hooks with 
dangerous “French ideas” should enter the realm of their 
royal masters. They sat among the students in the lecture 
hall and woe to the professor who uttered a word against the 
existing order of things. They followed the little boys and 
girls on their way to church lest they play hookey. 

In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. 
The Church had suffered greatly during the days of the Revolu¬ 
tion. The Church property had been confiscated. Several 
priests had been killed and the generation that had learned its 
catechism from Voltaire and Rousseau and the other French 
philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason when 
the Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of 
God in October of the year 1793. The priests had followed the 
“emigres” into their long exile. Now they returned in the 
wake of the allied armies and set to work with a vengeance. 

Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their 
former labors of educating the young. Their order had been 
a little too successful in its fight against the enemies of the 
Church. It had established “provinces” in every part of the 
world to teach the natives the blessings of Christianity, but 
soon it had developed into a regular trading company which 
was forever interfering with the civil authorities. During the 
reign of the Marquis de Pombal, the great reforming minister 
of Portugal, they had been driven out of the Portuguese lands 
and in the year 1733, at the request of most of the Catholic 
powers of Europe, the order had been suppressed by Pope 


THE GREAT REACTION 


369 


Clement XIV. Now they were back on the job, and preached 
the principles of “obedience” and “love for the legitimate dyn¬ 
asty” to children whose parents had hired shopwindows that 
they might laugh at Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold 
which was to end her misery. 


But in the Protestant countries like Prussia, things were 

not a whit better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812, 

the poets and the writers who had preached a holy war upon the 

usurper, were now branded as dangerous “demagogues.” Their 

houses were searched. Their letters were read. They were 

«/ 

obliged to report to the police at regular intervals and give an 
account of themselves. The Prussian drill master was let loose 
in all his fury upon the younger generation. When a party of 
students celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation with 

%j 

noisy but harmless festivities on the old Wartburg, the Prus¬ 
sian bureaucrats had visions of an imminent revolution. When 
a theological student, more honest than intelligent, killed a 
Russian government spy who was operating in Germany, the 
universities were placed under police supervision and profes¬ 
sors were jailed or dismissed without any form of trial. 

Russia, of course, was even more absurd in these anti-revo¬ 
lutionary activities. Alexander was gradually drifting toward 
melancholia. More and more he turned his back upon the West 
and became a truly Russian ruler whose interests lay in Con¬ 
stantinople, the old holy city that had been the first teacher of 
the Slavs. The older he grew, the harder he worked and the 
less he was able to accomplish. And while he sat in his study, 
his ministers turned the whole of Russia into a land of mili¬ 
tary barracks. 

It is not a pretty picture. Perhaps I might have shortened 
this description of the Great Reaction. But it is just as well 
that you should have a thorough knowledge of this era. It was 
not the first time that an attempt had been made to set the 
clock of history back. The result was the usual one. 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


* 


It will serve no good purpose to say “if only the Congress 
of Vienna had done such and such a thing instead of taking 
such and such a course, the history of Europe in the nineteenth 
century would have been different.” The Congress of Vienna 
was a gathering of men who had just passed through a great 
revolution and through twenty years of terrible and almost 
continuous warfare. They came together for the purpose of 
giving Europe that “peace and stability” which they thought 
that the people needed and wanted. They were what we call 
reactionaries. They sincerely believed in the inability of the 
mass of the people to rule themselves. They rearranged the 
map of Europe in such a way as seemed to promise the greatest 
possibility of a lasting success. They failed, but not through 
any premeditated wickedness on their part. They were, for the 
greater part, men of the old school who remembered the happier 
days of their quiet youth and ardently wished a return of that 
blessed period. They failed to recognize the strong hold which 
many of the revolutionary principles had gained upon the peo¬ 
ple of the European continent. That was a misfortune but 
hardly a sin. But one of the things which the French Revolu¬ 
tion had taught not only Europe but America as well, was the 
right of people to their own “nationality.” 

Napoleon, who respected nothing and nobody, was utterly 
ruthless in his dealing with national and patriotic aspirations. 
But the early revolutionary generals had proclaimed the new 


370 







NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


371 


doctrine that “nationality was not a matter of political fron¬ 
tiers or round skulls and broad noses, but a matter of the 
heart and soul.” While they were teaching the French children 
the greatness of the French nation, they encouraged Spaniards 
and Hollanders and Italians to do the same thing. Soon 
these people, who all shared Rousseau’s belief in the superior 
virtues of original man, began to dig into their past and found, 
buried beneath the ruins of the feudal system, the bones of the 
mighty race of which they supposed themselves the feeble 
descendants. 

The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of the 
great historical discoveries. Everywhere historians were busy 
publishing medieval charters and early medieval chronicles 
and in every country the result was a new pride in the old 
fatherland. A great deal of this sentiment was based upon the 
wrong interpretation of historical facts. But in practical poli¬ 
tics, it does not matter what is true, but everything depends 
upon what the people believe to be true. And in most countries 
both the kings and their subjects firmly believed in the glory 
and fame of their ancestors. 

The Congress of Vienna was not inclined to be sentimental. 
Their Excellencies divided the map of Europe according to the 
best interests of half a dozen dynasties and put “national aspi¬ 
rations” upon the Index, or list of forbidden books, together 
with all other dangerous “French doctrines.” 

But history is no respector of congresses. For some rea¬ 
son or other (it may be an historical law, which thus far has 
escaped the attention of the scholars) “nations” seemed to be 
necessary for the orderly development of human society and 
the attempt to stem this tide was quite as unsuccessful as the 
Metternichian effort to prevent people from thinking. 

Curiously enough the first trouble began in a very distant 
part of the world, in South America. The Spanish colonies 
of that continent had been enjoying a period of relative inde¬ 
pendence during the many years of the great Napoleonic wars. 
They had even remained faithful to their king when he was 
taken prisoner by the French emperor and they had refused 


372 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


to recognize Joseph Bonaparte, who had in the year 1808 been 
made king of Spain by order of his brother. 

Indeed, the only part of America to get very much upset 
by the Revolution was the island of Haiti. Here in the year 
1791 the French Convention, in a sudden outburst of love and 
human brotherhood, had bestowed upon their black brethren all 
the privileges hitherto enjoyed by their white masters. Just 
as suddenly they had repented of this step, hut the attempt 
to undo the original promise led to many years of terrible war¬ 
fare beween General Leclerc, the brother-in-law of Napoleon, 
and Toussaint 1’Ouverture, the negro chieftain. In the year 
1801 Toussaint was asked to visit Leclerc and discuss terms 
of peace. He received the solemn promise that he would not 
be molested. He trusted his white adversaries, was put on 
hoard a ship, and shortly afterward died in a French prison. 
But the negroes gained their independence all the same and 
founded a republic. Incidentally they were of considerable 
help to the first great South American patriot in his efforts to 
deliver his native country from the Spanish yoke. 

Simon Bolivar, a native of Caracas in Venezuela, born in 
the year 1783, had been educated in Spain; had visited Paris 
where he had seen the revolutionary government at work; had 
lived for a while in the United States; and had returned to his 
native land, where the widespread discontent against Spain, 
the mother country, was beginning to take a definite form. 
In the year 1811 Venezuela declared its independence and 
Bolivar became one of the revolutionary generals. Within 
two months the rebels were defeated and Bolivar fled. 

For the next five years he was the leader of an apparently 
lost cause. He sacrificed all his wealth and he would not have 
been able to begin his final and successful expedition without 
the support of the president of Haiti. Thereafter the revolt 
spread all over South America and soon it appeared that Spain 
was not able to suppress the rebellion unaided. She asked for 
the support of the Holy Alliance. 

This step greatly worried England. The British shippers 
had succeeded the Dutch as the common carriers of the world, 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


373 


and they expected to reap heavy profits from a declaration of 
independence on tlie part of all South America. They had 
hopes that the United States of America would interfere, but 



THE MONROE DOCTRINE 



























374 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the Senate had no such plans and in the House, too, there were 
many voices which declared that Spain ought to be given a 
free hand. 

Just then, there was a change of ministers in England. 
The Whigs went out and the Tories came in. George Canning 
became secretary of state. He dropped a hint that England 
would gladly back up the American government with all the 
might of her fleet, if said government would declare its disap¬ 
proval of the plans of the Holy Alliance in regard to the 
rebellious colonies of the southern continent. President Mon¬ 
roe thereupon, on the 2nd of December of the year 1823, ad¬ 
dressed Congress and stated that “America would consider 
any attempt on the part of the allied powers to extend their 
system to any portion of this western hemisphere as dangerous 
to our peace and safety,” and gave warning that “the American 
government would consider such action on the part of the 
Holy Alliance as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition 
toward the United States.” Four weeks later the text of the 
“Monroe Doctrine” was printed in the English newspapers and 
the members of the Holy Alliance were forced to make their 
choice. 

Metternich hesitated. Personally he would have been will¬ 
ing to risk the displeasure of the United States (which had al¬ 
lowed both its army and navy to fall into neglect since the end 
of the Anglo-American war of 1812). But Canning’s threat¬ 
ening attitude and trouble on the continent forced him to be 
careful. The expedition never took place and South America 
and Mexico gained their independence. 

As for the troubles on the continent of Europe, they were 
coming fast and furious. The Holy Alliance had sent French 
troops to Spain to act as guardians of the peace in the year 
1820. Austrian troops had been used for a similar purpose in 
Italy when the “Carbonari” (the secret society of the charcoal 
burners) were making propaganda for a united Italy and had 
caused a rebellion against the unspeakable Ferdinand of 
Naples. 

Bad news also came from Russia, where the death of Alex- 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


375 


ander had been the sign for a revolutionary outbreak in St. 
Petersburg, a short but bloody upheaval, which ended with the 
hanging of a large number of good patriots who had been dis¬ 
gusted by the reaction of Alexander’s last years and had tried 
to give Russia a constitutional form of government. 

But worse was to follow. Metternich had tried to assure 
himself of the continued support of the European courts by a 
series of conferences at agreeable watering places where the 
Austrian prime minister used to spend his summers. The 
delegates from the different powers always promised to do their 
best to suppress revolt, but they were none too certain of their 
success. The spirit of the people was beginning to be ugly and 
especially in France the position of the king was b^ no means 
satisfactory. 

The real trouble, however, began in the Balkans, the gate¬ 
way to western Europe through which the invaders of that 
continent had passed since the beginning of time. The first 
outbreak was in Moldavia, the ancient Roman province of 
Dacia which had been cut off from the empire in the third 
century. Since then, it had been a lost land, where the people 
had continued to speak the old Roman tongue and still called 
themselves Romans and their country Roumania. Here in the 
year 1821 a young Greek, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, began 
a revolt against the Turks. He told his followers that they 
could count upon the support of Russia. But Metternich’s 
fast couriers were soon on their way to St. Petersburg and the 
tsar, entirely persuaded by the Austrian arguments in favor of 
“peace and stability,” refused to help. Ypsilanti was forced to 
flee to Austria, where he spent the next seven years in prison. 

In the same year, 1821, trouble began in Greece. Since 
1815 a secret society of Greek patriots had been preparing 
the way for a revolt. Suddenly they hoisted the flag of inde¬ 
pendence in the Morea (the ancient Peloponnesus) and drove 
the Turkish garrisons away. The Turks answered in the usual 
fashion. They took the Greek patriarch of Constantinople, 
who was regarded as their pope both by the Greeks and by 
many Russians, and they hanged him on Easter Sunday of the 


376 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


year 1821, together with a number of his bishops. The Greeks 
came baek with a massacre of all the Mohammedans in 
Tripolitsa, the capital of the Morea, and the Turks retaliated 
by an attack upon the island of Chios, where they murdered 
25,000 Christians and sold 45,000 others as slaves into Asia and 
Egypt. 

Then the Greeks appealed to the European courts, but 
Metternich told them in so many words that they could “stew 
in their own grease” (I am not trying to make a pun, but I 
am quoting His Serene Highness, who informed the tsar that 
this “fire of revolt ought to burn itself out beyond the pale 
of civilization”), and the frontiers were closed to those volun¬ 
teers who wished to go to the rescue of the patriotic Hellenes. 
Their cause seemed lost. At the request of Turkey, an Egyp¬ 
tian army was landed in the Morea and soon the Turkish flag 
was again flying from the Acropolis, the ancient stronghold of 
Athens. The Egyptian army then pacified the country “a la 
Turque,” and Metternich followed the proceedings with quiet 
interest, awaiting the day when this “attempt against the peace 
of Europe” should he a thing of the past. 

Once more it was England which upset his plans. The 
greatest glory of England does not lie in her vast colonial 
possessions, in her wealth or her navy, but in the quiet cour¬ 
age and independence of her average citizen. The Englishman 
obeys the law because he knows that respect for the rights of 
others marks the difference between a dog-kennel and civilized 
society. But he does not recognize the right of others to 'inter¬ 
fere with his freedom of thought. If his country does some- 
tiling which lie believes to be wrong, he gets up and says so, 
and the government which he attacks will respect him and will 
give him full protection against the mob which to-day, as in 
the time of Socrates, often loves to destroy those who surpass 
it in courage or intelligence. There never has been a good 
cause, however unpopular or however distant, which has not 
counted a number of Englishmen among its staunchest adher¬ 
ents. the mass of the English people are not different from 
those in other lands. They stick to the business at hand and 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


377 


have no time for unpractical “sporting ventures.” But they 
rather admire their eccentric neighbor who drops everything 
to go and fight for some obscure people in Asia or Africa, and 
when he has been killed they give him a fine public funeral and 
hold him up to their children as an example of valor and 
chivalry. 

Even the police spies of the Holy Alliance were power¬ 
less against this national characteristic. In the year 1824 Lord 
Byron, a rich young Englishman who wrote the poetry over 
which all Europe wept, hoisted the sail of his yacht and started 
south to help the Greeks. Three months later the news spread 
through Europe that he lay dead in Missolonghi, the last of 
the Greek strongholds. His lonely death caught the imagi¬ 
nation of the people. In all countries, societies were formed 
to help the Greeks. Lafayette, the grand old man of the 
American Revolution, pleaded their cause in France. The king 
of Bavaria sent hundreds of his officers. Money and supplies 
poured in upon the starving men of Missolonghi. 

In England, George Canning, who had defeated the plans 
of the Holy Alliance in South America, was now prime minis¬ 
ter. He saw his chance to checkmate Metternich for a second 
time. The English and Russian fleets were already in the 
Mediterranean. They were sent by governments which dared 
no longer suppress the popular enthusiasm for the cause of the 
Greek patriots. The French navy appeared because France, 
since the end of the Crusades, had assumed the role of the de¬ 
fender of the Christian faith in Mohammedan lands. On Octo¬ 
ber 20 of the year 1827, the ships of the three nations attacked 
the Turkish fleet in the bay of Navarino and destroyed it. 
Rarely has the news of a battle been received with such general 
rejoicing. The people of western Europe and Russia who 
enjoyed no freedom at home consoled themselves by fighting 
an imaginary war of liberty on behalf of the oppressed Greeks. 
In the year 1829 they had their reward. Greece became an 
independent nation and the policy of reaction and stability 
suffered its second great defeat. 

It would be absurd were I to try, in this short volume, to 


878 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


give you a detailed account of the struggle for national inde¬ 
pendence in all other countries. There are a large number of 
excellent books devoted to such subjects. I have described the 
struggle for the independence of Greece because it was the first 
successful attack upon the bulwark of reaction which the Con¬ 
gress of Vienna had erected to “maintain the stability of Eu¬ 
rope.” That mighty fortress of suppression still held out and 
Metternich continued to be in command. But the end was 
near. 

In France the Bourbons had established an almost unbear¬ 
able rule of police officials who were trying to undo the work 
of the French Revolution, with an absolute disregard of the 
regulations and laws of civilized society. When Louis XVIII 
died in the year 1824, the people had enjoyed nine years of 
“peace” which had proved even more unhappy than the ten 
years of war of the empire. Louis was succeeded by his 
brother, Charles X. 

Louis had belonged to that famous Bourbon family which, 
although it never learned anything, never forgot anything. 
The recollection of that morning in the town of Hamm, when 
news had reached him of the decapitation of his brother, re¬ 
mained a constant warning of what might happen to those 
kings who did not read the signs of the times aright. Charles, 
on the other hand, who had managed to run up private debts of 
fifty million francs before he was twenty years of age, knew 
nothing, remembered nothing, and firmly intended to learn 
nothing. As soon as he had succeeded his brother, he estab¬ 
lished a government “by priests, through priests, and for 
priests,” and while the Duke of Wellington, who made this re¬ 
mark, cannot be called a violent liberal, Charles ruled in such 
a way that he disgusted even that trusted friend of law and 
order. When he tried to suppress the newspapers which dared 
to criticize his government, and dismiss the Parliament be¬ 
cause it supported the press, his days were numbered. 

On the night of the 27th of July of the year 1830, a revo¬ 
lution took place in Paris. On the 30th of the same month, the 
king fled to the coast and set sail for England. In this way 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


379 


the “famous farce of fifteen years” came to an end and the 
Bourbons were at last removed from the throne of France. 
They were too hopelessly incompetent. France then might 
have returned to a republican form of government, but such 
a step would not have been tolerated by Metternich. 

The situation was dangerous enough. The spark of rebel¬ 
lion had leaped beyond the French frontier and had set fire to 
another powder house filled with national grievances. The new 
kingdom of The Netherlands had not been a success. The Bel¬ 
gian and the Dutch people had nothing in common and their 
king, William of Orange (the descendant of an uncle of Wil¬ 
liam the Silent), while a hard worker and a good busi¬ 
ness man, was too much lacking in tact and pliability to keep 
the peace among his uncongenial subjects. Besides, the horde 
of priests which had descended upon France had at once found 
its way into Belgium and whatever Protestant William tried 
to do was howled down by large crowds of excited citizens as 
a fresh attempt upon the “freedom of the Catholic Church.” 
On the 25th of August there was a popular outbreak against 
the Dutch authorities in Brussels. Two months later the 
Belgians declared themselves independent and elected Leopold 
of Coburg, the uncle of Queen Victoria of England, to the 
throne. That was an excellent solution of the difficulty. The 
two countries, which ought never to have been united, parted 
their ways and thereafter lived in peace and harmony and be¬ 
haved like decent neighbors. 

News in those days, when there were only a few short rail¬ 
roads, traveled slowly; but when the success of the French 
and the Belgian revolutionists became known in Poland there 
was an immediate clash between the Poles and their Russian 
rulers which led to a year of terrible warfare and ended with a 
complete victory for the Russians, who “established order along 
the banks of the Vistula” in the well-known Russian fashion. 
Nicholas the First, who had succeeded his brother Alexander in 
1825, firmly believed in the divine right of his own family, 
and the thousands of Polish refugees who had found shelter 
in western Europe bore witness to the fact that the principles 


380 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of the Holy Alliance were still more than a hollow phrase in 
Russia. 

In Italy too there was a moment of unrest. Marie Louise, 
Duchess of Parma and wife of the former Emperor Napo¬ 
leon, whom she had deserted after the defeat of Waterloo, was 
driven away from her country, and in the Papal State the exas¬ 
perated people tried to establish an independent republic. 
But the armies of Austria marched to Rome and soon every¬ 
thing was as of old. Metternich continued to reside at the Ball 
Platz, the home of the foreign minister of the Habsburg 
dynasty; the police spies returned to their jobs, and peace 
reigned supreme. Eighteen more years were to pass before a 
second and more successful attempt could be made to deliver 
Europe from the terrible inheritance of the Vienna Congress. 

Again it was France, the revolutionary weathercock of 
Europe, which gave the signal of revolt. Charles X had been 
succeeded by Louis Philippe, the son of that famous Duke of 
Orleans who had turned Jacobin, had voted for the death of his 
cousin the king, and had played a role during the early days 
of the Revolution under the name of “Philippe Egalite” or 
“Equality Philip.” Eventually he had been killed when 
Robespierre tried to purge the nation of all “traitors” (by 
which name he indicated those people who did not share his own 
views) and his son had been forced to run away from the 
revolutionary army. Young Louis Philippe thereupon had 
wandered far and wide. He had taught school in Switzerland 
and had spent a couple of years exploring the unknown “Far 
West” of America. After the fall of Napoleon he had returned 
to Paris. He was much more intelligent than his Bourbon 
cousins. He was a simple man who went about in the public 
parks with a red cotton umbrella under his arm, followed by a 
brood of children like any good housefather. But France had 
outgrown the king business, and Louis did not know this until 
the morning of the 24th of February of the year 1848, when 
a crowd stormed the Tuileries and drove His Majesty away 
and proclaimed the republic. 

When the news of this event reached Vienna, Metternich 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


381 


expressed the casual opinion that this was only a repetition 
of the year 1793 and that the allies would once more be obliged 
to march upon Paris and make an end to this very unseemly 
democratic row. But two weeks later his own Austrian capital 
was in open revolt. Metternich escaped from the mob through 
the back door of his palace, and the Emperor Ferdinand was 
forced to give his subjects a constitution that embodied most 
of the revolutionary principles which his prime minister had 
tried to suppress for the last thirty-three years. 

This time all Europe felt the shock. Hungary declared it¬ 
self independent, and commenced a war against the Habs- 
burgs under the leadership of Louis Kossuth. The unequal 
struggle lasted more than a year. It was finally suppressed by 
the armies of Tsar Nicholas, who marched across the Carpa¬ 
thian Mountains and made Hungary once more safe for autoc¬ 
racy. The Habsburgs thereupon established extraordinary 
courts-martial and hanged the greater part of the Hungarian 
patriots whom they had not been able to defeat in open battle. 

As for Italy, the island of Sicily declared itself independent 
from Naples and drove its Bourbon kings away. In the Papal 
State the prime minister, Rossi, was murdered and the pope 
was forced to flee. He returned the next year at the head of a 
French army, which remained in Rome to protect His Holi¬ 
ness against his subjects until the year 1870. Then it was 
called back to defend France against the Prussians, and Rome 
became the capital of Italy. In the north, Milan and Venice 
rose against their Austrian masters. They were supported by 
King Albert of Sardinia, but a strong Austrian army marched 
into the valley of the Po, defeated the Sardinians, and forced 
Albert to abdicate in favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel, who 
a few years later was to be the first king of a united Italy. 

In Germany, the unrest of the year 1848 took the form of a 
great national demonstration in favor of political unity and a 
representative form of government. In Bavaria, the king, who 
had wasted his time and money upon an Irish lady who posed as 
a Spanish dancer (she was called Lola Montez and lies buried 
in New York’s Potter’s Field), was driven away by the en- 


382 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


raged students of the university. In Prussia, the king was 
forced to stand with uncovered head before the coffins of those 
who had been killed during the street fighting and to promise a 
constitutional form of government. And in March of the year 
1849, a German parliament, consisting of 550 delegates from 
all parts of the country, came together in Frankfort and pro¬ 
posed that King Frederick William of Prussia should be the 
emperor of a united Germany. 

Then, however, the tide began to turn. Incompetent Ferdi¬ 
nand had abdicated in favor of his nephew Francis Joseph. 
The well-drilled Austrian army had remained faithful to its 
war lord. The hangman was given plenty of work and the 
Habsburgs, after the nature of that strangely catlike fam¬ 
ily, once more landed upon their feet and rapidly strengthened 
their position as the masters of eastern and western Europe. 
They played the game of politics very adroitly and used the 
jealousies of the other German states to prevent the elevation 
of the Prussian king to the imperial dignity. Their long train¬ 
ing in the art of suffering defeat had taught them the value of 
patience. They knew how to wait. They bided their time 
and while the liberals, utterly untrained in practical politics, 
talked and talked and talked and got intoxicated by their own 
fine speeches, the Austrians quietly gathered their forces, dis¬ 
missed the Parliament of Frankfort, and reestablished the old 
and impossible German Confederation which the Congress of 
Vienna had wished upon an unsuspecting world. 

But among the men who had attended this strange Parlia¬ 
ment of unpractical enthusiasts, there was a Prussian country 
squire by the name of Bismarck who had made good use of his 
eyes and ears. He had a deep contempt for oratory. He knew 
(what every man of action has always known) that nothing 
is ever accomplished by talk. In his own way he was a sincere 
patriot. He had been trained in the old school of diplomacy 
and he could outlie his opponents just as he could outwalk 
them and outdrink them and outride them. 

Bismarck felt convinced that the loose confederation of 
little states must be changed into a strong united country 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


383 




if it would hold its own against the other European powers. 
Brought up amidst feudal ideas of loyalty, he decided that 
the House of Hohenzollern, of which he was the most faithful 
servant, should rule the new state, rather than the incompetent 
Habsburgs. For this purpose he must first get rid of the 
Austrian influence, and he began to make the necessary prepa¬ 
rations for this painful operation. 

Italy in the meantime had solved her own problem, and had 
rid herself of her hated Austrian master. The unity of Italy 
was the work of three men, Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi. 
Of these three, Cavour, the civil engineer with the shortsighted 
eyes and the steel-rimmed glasses, played the part of the care¬ 
ful political pilot. Mazzini, who had spent most of his days 
in different European garrets, 
hiding from the Austrian police, 
was the public agitator, while 
Garibaldi, with his band of red- 
shirted roughriders, appealed 
to the popular imagination. 

Mazzini and Garibaldi were 
both believers in the republican 
form of government. Cavour, 
however, was a monarchist, and 
the others who recognized his 
superior ability in such matters 
of practical statecraft, accepted 
his decision and sacrificed their 
own ambitions for the greater 
good of their Fatherland. 

Cavour felt towards the House of Sardinia as Bismarck 
did towards the Hohenzollern family. With infinite care and 
great shrewdness he set to work to jockey the Sardinian king 
into a position from which His Majesty would be able to as¬ 
sume the leadership of the entire Italian people. The unsettled 
political conditions in the rest of Europe greatly helped him in 
his plans, and no country contributed more to the independ¬ 
ence of Italy than her old and trusted (and often distrusted) 
neighbor, France. 



GIUSEPPE MAZZINI 






































384 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


In that turbulent country, in November of the year 1852, 
the republic bad come to a sudden but not unexpected end. 
Napoleon III, the son of Louis Bonaparte the former king of 
Holland, and the small nephew of a great-uncle, bad reestab¬ 
lished an empire and bad made himself emperor “by the grace 
of God and the will of the people.” 

This young man, who bad been educated in Germany and 
who mixed bis French with harsh Teutonic gutturals (just 
as the first Napoleon bad always spoken the language of bis 
adopted country with a strong Italian accent), was trying very 
bard to use the Napoleonic tradition for bis own benefit. But 
be bad many enemies and did not feel very certain of his bold 
upon his ready-made throne. He bad gained the friendship 
of Queen Victoria; but this bad not been a difficult task, as the 
good queen was not particularly brilliant and was very sus¬ 
ceptible to flattery. As for the other European sovereigns, 
they treated the French emperor with insulting haughtiness 
and sat up nights devising new ways in which they could show 
him how sincerely they despised him. 

Napoleon was obliged to find a way in which he could break 
this opposition, either through love or through fear. He well 
knew the fascination which the word “glory” still held for his 
subjects. Since he was forced to gamble for his throne he 
decided to play the game of empire for high stakes. He used 
an attack of Russia upon Turkey as an excuse for bringing 
about the Crimean War, in which England and France com¬ 
bined against the tsar on behalf of the sultan. It was a very 

•s 

costly and exceedingly unprofitable enterprise. No one of the 
nations concerned reaped much glory. 

But the Crimean War did one good thing. It gave Sar¬ 
dinia a chance to volunteer on the winning side, and when 
peace was declared it gave Cavour the opportunity to lay claim 
to the gratitude of both England and France. 

Having made use of the international situation to get Sar¬ 
dinia recognized as one of the more important powers of 
Europe, the clever Italian then provoked a war between Sar¬ 
dinia and Austria in June of the year 1859. He assured him- 



NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


385 


self of the support of Napoleon in exchange for the provinces 
of Savoy and the city of Nice, which was really an Italian 
town. The Franco-Italian armies defeated the Austrians at 
Magenta and Solferino, and the former Austrian provinces and 
duchies were united into a single Italian kingdom. Florence 
became the capital of this new Italy until the year 1870, when 
the French recalled their troops from Rome to defend France 
against the Germans. As soon as they were gone, the Italian 
troops entered the Eternal City and the House of Sardinia 
took up its residence in the old palace of the Quirinal which an 
ancient pope had built on the ruins of the baths of the Emperor 
Constantine. 

The pope, however, moved across the River Tiber and hid 
behind the walls of the Vatican, which had been the home of 
many of his predecessors. He protested loudly against this 
high -handed theft of his domains and addressed letters of ap¬ 
peal to those faithful Catholics who were inclined to sympa¬ 
thize with him in his loss. Their number, however, was small, 
and it has been steadily decreasing. For, once delivered from 
the cares of state, the pope was able to devote all his time to 
questions of a spiritual nature. Standing high above the petty 
quarrels of the European politicians, the papacy assumed a new 
dignity which proved of great benefit to the Church and made 
it an international power for social and religious progress 
which has shown a much more intelligent appreciation of mod¬ 
ern economic problems than most Protestant sects. 

In this way, the attempt of the Congress of Vienna to 
settle the Italian question by making the peninsula an Aus¬ 
trian province was at last undone. 

The German problem, however, remained as yet unsolved. 
It proved the most difficult of all. The failure of the revolution 
of the year 1848 had led to the wholesale migration of the more 
energetic and liberal elements among the German people. 
These young fellows had moved to the United States of Amer¬ 
ica, to Brazil, to the new colonies in Asia and America. Their 
work was continued in Germany, but by a different sort of men. 

In the new diet which met at Frankfort, after the collapse 


386 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


of the German parliament and the failure of the liberals to 
establish a united country, the kingdom of Prussia was rep¬ 
resented by that same Otto von Bismarck from whom we parted 
a few pages ago. Bismarck by now had managed to gain the 
complete confidence of the king of Prussia. That was all he 
asked for. The opinion of the Prussian parliament or of the 
Prussian people interested him not at all. With his own eyes 
he had seen the defeat of the liberals. He knew that he would 
not be able to get rid of Austria without a war and he began 
by strengthening the Prussian army. The parliament, exas¬ 
perated at his high-handed methods, refused to give him the 
necessary credits. Bismarck did not even bother to discuss 
the matter. He went ahead and increased his army with the 
help of funds which the Prussian house of peers and the king 
placed at his disposal. Then he looked for a national cause 
which could be used for the purpose of creating a great wave 
of patriotism among all the German people. 

In the north of Germany there were the duchies of Schles¬ 
wig and Holstein, which ever since the middle ages had been a 
source of trouble. Both countries were inhabited by a certain 
number of Danes and a certain number of Germans, but al¬ 
though they were governed by the king of Denmark, they 
were not an integral part of the Danish state, and this led to 
endless difficulties. Heaven forbid that I should revive this 
forgotten question, which now seems settled by the acts of the 
recent Congress of Versailles. But the Germans in Holstein 
were very loud in their abuse of the Danes and the Danes in 
Schleswig made a great ado of their Danishness, and all Eu¬ 
rope was discussing the problem and German Mannerchors 
and Turnvereins listened to sentimental speeches about the 
“lost brethren” and the different chancelleries were trying to 
discover what it was all about, when Prussia mobilized her 
armies to “save the lost provinces.” As Austria, the official 
head of the German Confederation, could not allow Prussia 
to act alone in such an important matter, the Habsburg troops 
were mobilized too, and the combined armies of the two great 
powers crossed the Danish frontiers. After a very brave re- 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


387 


sistance on the part of the Danes, they occupied the two 
duchies. The Danes appealed to Europe, but Europe was 
otherwise engaged and the poor Danes were left to their fate. 

Bismarck then prepared the scene for the second number 
upon his imperial programme. He used the division of the 
spoils to pick a quarrel with Austria. The Habsburgs fell into 
the trap. The new Prussian army, the creation of Bismarck 
and his faithful generals, invaded Bohemia and in less than six 
weeks the last of the Austrian troops had been destroyed and 
the road to Vienna lay open. But Bismarck did not want to 
go too far. He knew that he would need a few friends in 
Europe. He offered the defeated Habsburgs very decent 
terms of peace, provided they would resign their chairmanship 
of the Confederation. He was less merciful to many of the 
smaller German states, who had taken the side of the Austrians, 
and annexed them to Prussia. The greater part of the north¬ 
ern states then formed a new organization, the so-called North 
German Confederation, and victorious Prussia assumed the un¬ 
official leadership of the German people. 

Europe stood aghast at the rapidity with which the work of 
consolidation had been done. England was quite indifferent 
but France showed signs of disapproval. Napoleon’s hold, 
however, upon the French people was steadily diminishing. 
The Crimean War had been costly and had accomplished 
nothing. 

A second adventure in the year 1863, when a French army 
had tried to force an Austrian grand duke by the name of 
Maximilian upon the Mexican people as their emperor, had 
come to a disastrous end as soon as the American Civil War 
had been won by the North. For the government at Washing¬ 
ton had forced the French to withdraw their troops and this 
had given the Mexicans a chance to clear their country of the 
enemy and shoot the unwelcome emperor. 

It was necessary to give the Napoleonic throne a new coat 
of glory-paint. Within a few years the North German Con¬ 
federation would be a serious rival of France. Napoleon de¬ 
cided that a war with Germany would be a good thing for his 


388 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


dynasty. He looked for an excuse and Spain, the poor victim 
of endless revolutions, gave him one. 

Just then the Spanish throne happened to be vacant. It 
had been offered to the Catholic branch of the House of Hohen- 
zollern. The French government had objected and the Hoh- 
enzollerns had politely refused to accept the crown. But 
Napoleon, who was showing signs of illness, was very much 
under the influence of his beautiful wife, Eugenie de Montijo, 
the daughter of a Spanish gentleman and the granddaughter 
of William Kirkpatrick, an American consul at Malaga, where 
the grapes come from. Eugenie, although shrewd enough, was 
as badly educated as most Spanish women of that day. She 
was at the mercy of her spiritual advisers and these worthy gen¬ 
tleman felt no love for the Protestant king of Prussia. “Be 
bold,” was the advice of the empress to her husband, but she 
omitted to add the second half of that famous Persian proverb 
which admonishes the hero to “be bold but not too bold.” 
Napoleon, convinced of the strength of his army, addressed 
himself to the king of Prussia and insisted that the king give 
him assurances that “he would never permit another candi¬ 
dature of a Hohenzollern prince to the Spanish crown.” As 
the Hohenzollerns had just declined the honor, the demand 
was superfluous, and Bismarck so informed the French govern¬ 
ment. But Napoleon was not satisfied. 

It was the year 1870 and King William was taking the 
waters at Ems. There one day he was approached by the 
French minister, who tried to reopen the discussion. The king 
answered very pleasantly that it was a fine day and that the 
Spanish question was now closed and that nothing more re¬ 
mained to be said upon the subject. As a matter of routine, 
a report of this interview was telegraphed to Bismarck, who 
handled all foreign affairs. Bismarck edited the dispatch for 
the benefit of the Prussian and French press. Many people 
have called him names for doing this. Bismarck, however, 
could plead the excuse that the doctoring of official news, since 
time immemorial, had been one of the privileges of all civilized 
governments. When the “edited” telegram was printed the 


NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 


389 


good people m Berlin felt that their old and venerable king 
with his nice white whiskers had been insulted by an arrogant 
little Frenchman and the equally good people of Paris flew 
into a rage, because their perfectly courteous minister had been 
shown the door by a royal Prussian flunkey. 

And so they both went to war, and in less than two months 
Napoleon and the greater part of his army were prisoners of 
the Germans. The Second Empire had come to an end and the 
Third Republic was making ready to defend Paris against the 
German invaders. Paris held out for five long months. Ten 
days before the surrender of the city, in the near-by palace of 
Versailles, built by that same King Louis XIV who had been 
such a dangerous enemy to the Germans, the king of Prussia 
was publicly proclaimed German emperor and a loud booming 
of guns told the hungry Parisians that a new German Empire 
had taken the place of the old harmless Confederation of Teu¬ 
tonic states and statelets. 

In this rough way, the German question was finally settled. 
By the end of the year 1871, fifty-six years after the memorable 
gathering at Vienna, the work of the Congress had been entire¬ 
ly undone. Metternich and Alexander and Talleyrand had 
tried to give the people of Europe a lasting peace. The meth¬ 
ods they had eirqdoyed had caused endless wars and revolu¬ 
tions, and the feeling of a common brotherhood of the eigh¬ 
teenth century was followed by an era of exaggerated national¬ 
ism which has not yet come to an end. 


THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 


The greatest benefactor of the human race died more than 
half a million years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low 
brow and sunken eyes, a heavy jaw and strong tigerlike teeth. 
He would not have looked well in a gathering of modern sci¬ 
entists, but they would have honored him as their master. For 
he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift up a heavy 
boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our 
first tools, and he did more than any human being who came 
after him to give man his enormous advantage over the other 
animals with whom be shares this planet. 

Ever since, man has tried to make his life easier by the use 
of a greater number of tools. Tbe first wheel (a round disc 
made out of an old tree) created as much stir in the communi¬ 
ties of 100,000 b.c. as the flying machine did only a few years 
ago. 

In Washington the story is told of a director of the Patent 
Office who in the early ’thirties of the last century suggested 
that the Patent Office be abolished, because “everything that 
possibly could be invented had been invented.” A similar 
feeling must have spread through the prehistoric world when 
the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the people were able 
to move from place to place without rowing or punting or 
pulling from the shore. 

Indeed one of the most interesting chapters of history is 
the effort of man to let someone else or something else do his 


390 










THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 


391 


work for him, while he enjoyed his leisure, sitting in the sun 
or painting pictures on rocks or training young wolves and 
little tigers to behave like peaceful domestic animals. 

Of course in the very olden days it was always possible 
to enslave a weaker neighbor and force him to do the unpleas¬ 
ant tasks of life. One of the reasons why the Greeks and 
Romans, who were quite as intelligent as we are, failed to 
devise more interesting machinery, was to be found in the wide¬ 
spread existence of slavery. Why should a great mathema¬ 
tician waste his time upon wires and pulleys and cogs and fill 
the air with noise and smoke when he could go to the market 
place and buy all the slaves he needed at a very small expense ? 

And during the middle ages, although slavery had been 
abolished and only a mild form of serfdom survived, the guilds 
discouraged the idea of using machinery, because they thought 
this would throw a large number of their brethren out of work. 
Besides, the middle ages were not at all interested in producing 
large quantities of goods. Their tailors and butchers and car¬ 
penters worked for the immediate needs of the small com¬ 
munity in which they lived and had no desire to compete with 
their neighbors or to produce more than was strictly necessary. 

During the Renaissance, when the prejudices of the Church 
against scientific investigations could no longer be enforced as 
rigidly as before, a large number of men began to devote their 
lives to mathematics and astronomy and physics and chemistry. 
Two years before the beginning of the Thirty Years War, 
John Napier, a Scotchman, had published his little book which 
described the new invention of logarithms. During the war it¬ 
self, Gottfried Leibnitz of Leipzig had perfected the system of 
infinitesimal calculus. Eight years before the peace of West¬ 
phalia, Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was 
born, and in that same year Galileo, the Italian astronomer, 
died. Meanwhile the Thirty Years War had destroyed the 
prosperity of central Europe and there was a sudden but very 
general interest in “alchemy,” the strange pseudo-science of the 
middle ages by which people hoped to turn base metals into 
gold. This proved to be impossible, but the alchemists in their 



392 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


laboratories stumbled upon many new ideas and greatly helped 
the work of the chemists who were their successors. 

The work of all these men provided the world with a solid 
scientific foundation upon which it was possible to build even 
the most complicated of engines, and a number of practical 
men made good use of it. The middle ages had used wood for 
the few bits of necessary machinery. But wood wore out 
easily. Iron was a much better material, but iron was scarce 
except in England. In England, therefore, most of the smelt¬ 
ing was done. To smelt iron, huge fires were needed. In the 
beginning, these fires had been made of wood, but gradually 
the forests had been used up. Then “stone coal” (the petri¬ 
fied trees of prehistoric times) was used. But coal, as you 
know, has to be dug out of the ground and it has to be trans¬ 
ported to the smelting ovens and the mines have to be kept 
dry from the ever-invading waters. 

These were two problems which had to be solved at once. 

For the time being, horses could still be used to haul the coal- 

wagons, but the pumping question demanded the application 

of special machinery. Several inventors were busy trying to 

solve the difficulty. They all knew that steam would have to 

be used in their new engine. The idea of the steam engine was 

very old. Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century 

before Christ, has described to us several bits of machinerv 

•/ 

which were driven by steam. The people of the Renaissance 
had played with the notion of steam-driven war chariots. The 
Marquis of Worcester, a contemporary of Newton, in his book 
of inventions, tells of a steam engine. A little later, in the year 
1698, Thomas Savery of London applied for a patent for a 
pumping engine. At the same time, a Hollander, Christian 
IIu 3 r gens, was trying to perfect an engine in which gunpowder 
was used to cause regular explosions in much the same way as 
we use gasoline in our motors. 

All over Europe, people were busy with the idea. Denis 
Papin, a Frenchman, friend and assistant of Huygens, was 
making experiments with steam engines in several countries. 
He invented a little wagon that was driven by steam, and a 



THE MODERN CITY 
























































394 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


paddle-wheel boat. But when he tried to take a trip in his 
vessel, it was confiscated by the authorities on a complaint of 
the boatmen’s union, who feared that such a craft would de¬ 
prive them of their livelihood. Papin finally died in London in 
great poverty, having wasted all his money on his inventions. 
But at the time of his death, another mechanical enthusiast, 
Thomas Newcomen, was working on the problem of a new 
steam pump. Fifty years later his engine was improved upon 
by James Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year 
1777 he gave the world the first steam engine that proved of 
real practical value. 

But during the centuries of experiments with a ‘ heat en¬ 
gine,” the political world had greatly changed. The British 
people had succeeded the Dutch as the common carriers of the 
world’s trade. They had opened up new colonies. They took 
the raw materials which the colonies produced to England, 
and there they turned them into finished products, and then 
they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the 
world. During the seventeenth century the people of Georgia 
and the Carolinas had begun to grow a new shrub which gave 
a strange sort of woolly substance, the so-called “cotton wool.” 
After this had been plucked, it was sent to England and there 
the people of Lancashire wove it into cloth. This weaving 
was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen. Very soon 
a number of improvements were made in the process of weav¬ 
ing. In the year 1730 John Ivay invented the “fly shuttle.” 
In 1770 James Hargreaves got a patent on his “spinning 
jenny.” Eli Whitney, an American, invented the cotton-gin, 
which separated the cotton from its seeds, a job which had pre¬ 
viously been done by hand at the rate of only a pound a day. 
Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund Cart¬ 
wright invented large weaving machines, which were driven by 
water power. And then, in the ’eighties of the eighteenth 
century, just when the Estates General of France had begun 
those famous meetings which were to revolutionize the political 
system of Europe, the engines of Watt were arranged in such 
a way that they could drive the weaving machines of Ark- 


THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 


395 


wright, and this created an economic and social revolution 
which has changed human relationship in almost every part 
of the world. 

As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success, the 
inventors turned their attention to the problem of propelling 
boats and carts with the help of a mechanical contrivance. 
Watt himself designed plans for a “steam locomotive,” but 
ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year 1804, a locomotive 
made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty tons at 
Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district. 

At the same time an American jeweler and portrait-painter 
by the name of Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to con¬ 
vince Napoleon that with the use of his submarine boat, the 
“Nautilus,” and his “steamboat,” the French might be able to 
destroy the naval supremacy of England. 

Fulton’s idea of a steamboat was not original. He had un¬ 
doubtedly copied it from John Fitch, a mechanical genius of 
Connecticut whose cleverly constructed steamer had first navi¬ 
gated the Delaware River as early as the year 1787. But 
Napoleon and his scientific advisers did not believe in the prac¬ 
tical possibility of a self-propelled boat, and although the 
Scotch-built engine of the little craft puffed merrily on the 
Seine, the great emperor neglected to avail himself of this 
formidable weapon which might have given him his revenge for 
Trafalgar. 

As for Fulton, he returned to the United States and, being 
a practical man of business, organized a successful steamboat 
company together with Robert R. Livingston, a signer of 
the Declaration of Independence, who was American Minister 
to France when Fulton was in Paris, trying to sell his inven¬ 
tion. The first steamer of this new company, the Clermont, 
which was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York 
State, equipped with an engine built by Boulton and Watt of 
Birmingham in England, began a regular service between New 
York and Albany in the year 1807. 

As for poor John Fitch, the man who long before anyone 
else had used the “steamboat” for commercial purposes, he 


396 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


came to a sad death. Broken in health and empty of purse, he 
had come to the end of his resources when his fifth boat, which 
was propelled by means of a screw-propeller, had been de¬ 
stroyed. His neighbors jeered at him, as they were to laugh a 
hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his 
funny flying machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country 
an easy access to the broad rivers of the West and his country¬ 
men preferred to travel in fiatboats or go on foot. In the year 



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tjl 's /A/ Jo /T tOAj USBJ) 0/u 7 luB usi ft 


THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 

1798, in utter despair and misery, Fitch killed himself by tak¬ 
ing poison. 

But twenty years later, the Savannah, a steamer of 1850 
tons and making six knots an hour (the Mauretania goes just 
four times as fast), crossed the ocean from Savannah to Liver¬ 
pool in the record time of twenty-five days. Then there was 
an end to the derision of the multitude and in their enthusiasm 
the people gave the credit for the invention to the wrong man. 

Six years later, George Stephenson, a Scotchman, who had 
been building locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from 
the mine-pit to smelting ovens and cotton factories, built his 


































THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 


397 


famous “traveling engine” which reduced the price of coal by 
almost seventy per cent and which made it possible to estab¬ 
lish the first regular passenger service between Manchester and 
Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to city at the 
unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years 
later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. 
At the present time, any well-behaved flivver can do better 
than these early “Puffing Billies.” 



THE ORIGIN OF THE STEAMBOAT 


But while these practical-minded engineers were improv¬ 
ing upon their rattling “heat engines,” a group of “pure” 
scientists (men who devote fourteen hours of each day to the 
study of those “theoretical” scientific phenomena without which 
no mechanical progress would lie possible) were following a 
new scent which promised to lead them into the most secret and 
hidden domains of Nature. 


















398 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Two thousand years ago, a number of Greek and Roman 
philosophers (notably Thales of Miletus and Pliny, who was 
killed while trying to study the eruption of Vesuvius of the 
year 79 when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried beneath 
the ashes) had noticed the strange antics of bits of straw and of 
feather which were held near a piece of amber which was being 


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3 a £ e 




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ftofjc: a 

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I H e oRiciaj Of Ttie A o *7 o Mo^ 1 wS 


THE ORIGIN OF THE AUTOMOBILE 


rubbed with a bit of wool. The schoolmen of the middle ages 
had not been interested in this mysterious “electric” power. 
But immediately after the Renaissance, William Gilbert, the 
private physician of Queen Elizabeth, wrote his famous treatise 
on the character and behavior of magnets. During the Thirty 
Years War Otto von Guericke, the burgomaster of Madge- 
burg and the inventor of the air pump, constructed the first 





























THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 


399 


electrical machine. During the next century a large number of 
scientists devoted themselves to the study of electricity. Not 
less than three professors invented the famous Leyden Jar in 
the year 1795. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin was 
devoting his attention to this subject. He discovered that 
lightning and the electric spark were manifestations of the 
same electric power and continued his electric studies until the 
end of his busy and useful life. Then came Volta with his 
famous “electric pile,” and Galvani and Day and the Danish 
professor Hans Christian Oersted and Ampere and Arago and 
Faraday, all of them diligent searchers after the true nature 
of the electric forces. 

They freely gave their discoveries to the world, and Samuel 
Morse (who like Fulton began his career as an artist) thought 
that he could use this new electric current to transmit mes¬ 
sages from one city to another. He intended to use copper 
wire and a little machine which he had invented. People 
laughed at him. Morse therefore was obliged to finance his 
own experiments and soon he had spent all his money and 
then he was very poor and j^eople laughed even louder. He 
then asked Congress to help him, and a special Committee on 
Commerce promised him its support. But the members of 
Congress were not at all interested, and Morse had to wait 
twelve years before he was given a small congressional appro¬ 
priation. He then built a “telegraph” between Baltimore and 
Washington. In the year 1837 he had shown his first success¬ 
ful “telegraph” in one of the lecture halls of New York Uni¬ 
versity. Finally, on the 24th of May of the year 1844, the 
first long-distance message was sent from Washington to Bal¬ 
timore, and to-day the whole world is covered with telegraph 
wires and we can send news from Europe to Asia in a few sec¬ 
onds. Twenty-three years later Alexander Graham Bell used 
the electric current for his telephone. And half a century after¬ 
ward Marconi improved upon these ideas by inventing a sys¬ 
tem of sending messages which did away entirely with the old- 
fashioned wires. 

While Morse, the New Englander, was working on his 


400 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


“telegraph/ 1 Michael Faraday had constructed the first “dyna¬ 
mo.” This tiny little machine was completed in the year 1831, 
when Europe was still trembling as a result of the great July 
revolutions which had so severely upset the plans of the Con¬ 
gress of Vienna. The dynamo grew and grew and grew and 
to-day it provides us with heat and with light (you know the 
little incandescent bulbs which Edison, building upon French 
and English experiments of the ’forties and ’fifties, first made 
in 1878) and with power for all sorts of machines. If I am 
not mistaken, the electric engine will soon entirely drive out 
the “heat engine,” just as in the olden days the more highly 
organized prehistoric animals drove out their less efficient 
neighbors. 

Personally (but I know nothing about machinery) this will 
make me very happy. For the electric engine, which can be 
run by water power, is a clean and companionable servant of 
mankind, but the “heat engine,” the marvel of the eighteenth 
century, is a noisy and dirty creature forever filling the world 
with ridiculous smokestacks and with dust and soot and ask¬ 
ing that it be fed with coal, which has to he dug out of mines at 
great inconvenience and risk to thousands of people. 

And if I were a novelist and not a historian, who must stick 
to facts and may not use his imagination, I would describe the 
happy day when the last steam locomotive shall be taken to the 
Museum of Natural History to be placed next to the skeleton 
of the dinosaur and the pterodactyl and the other extinct crea¬ 
tures of a bygone age. 


THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 


In the olden days the work of the world had been done by 
independent workmen who sat in their own little workshops in 
the fronts of their houses, who owned their tools, who boxed the 
ears of their own apprentices, and who, within the limits pre¬ 
scribed by their guilds, conducted their business as it pleased 
them. They lived simple lives, and were obliged to work very 
long hours, but they were their own masters. If they got up 
and saw that it was a line day to go fishing, they went fishing 
and there was no one to say “no.” 

But the introduction of machinery changed this. A ma¬ 
chine is really nothing but a greatly enlarged tool. A rail¬ 
road train which carries you at the speed of a mile a minute is 
in reality a pair of very fast legs, and a steam hammer which 
flattens heavy plates of iron is just a terrible big fist, made of 
steel. 

But whereas we can all afford a pair of good legs and a 
good strong fist, a railroad train and a steam hammer and a 
cotton factory are very expensive pieces of machinery and they 
are usually owned not by a single man, but by a company of 
people who all contribute a certain sum and then divide the 
profits according to the amount of money which they have 
invested. 

Therefore, when machines had been improved until they 
were really practicable and profitable, the builders of those 
large tools, the machine manufacturers, began to look for cus¬ 
tomers who could afford to pay for them in cash. 


401 







402 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


During the early middle ages, when land had been almost 
the only form of wealth, the nobility were the only people 
who were considered wealthy. But, as I have told you in a 
previous chapter, the gold and silver which they possessed 
was quite insignificant and they used the old system of bar- 


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_ M£aS / ££J>£^> Tu HiOt/e A fi£AI/y *STo/u^ 

IU f 



svoijA&Ays LiT7lE_Jj>/r&H>L C» J o A/& &o[ 

"Tug A^«4a ,: />v Tjate, 



MAN POWER AND MACHINE POWER 


ter, exchanging cows for horses and eggs for honey. During 
the Crusades, the burghers of the cities had been able to gather 
riches from the reviving trade between the East and the West, 
and they had been serious rivals of the lords and the knights. 

The French Revolution had entirely destroyed the wealth 

























THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 


403 


of the nobility and had enormously increased that of the middle 
class or “bourgeoisie.” The years of unrest which followed the 
great Revolution had offered many middle-class people a chance 
to get more than their share of this world’s goods. The estates 
of the Church had been confiscated by the French Convention 
and sold at auction. There had been a terrific amount of graft. 
Land speculators had stolen thousands of square miles of valu¬ 
able land, and during the Napoleonic wars they had used their 
capital to “profiteer” in grain and gunpowder; they now pos¬ 
sessed more wealth than they needed for the actual expenses 
of their households, and they coidd afford to build themselves 
factories and to hire men and women to work the machines. 

This caused a very abrupt change in the lives of hundreds 
of thousands of people. Within a few years, many cities 
doubled the number of their inhabitants and the old civic center, 
which had been the real “home” of the citizens, was surrounded 
with ugly and cheaply built suburbs where the workmen slept 
after their eleven or twelve hours, or thirteen hours, spent in 
the factories and from where they returned to the factory as 
soon as the whistle blew. 

Far and wide through the countryside there was talk of the 
fabulous sums of money that could be made in the towns. The 
peasant boy, accustomed to a life in the open, went to the city. 
He rapidly lost his old health amidst the smoke and dust and 
dirt of those early and badly ventilated workshops, and the 
end, very often, was death in the poorhouse or in the hospital. 

Of course the change from the farm to the factory on the 
part of so many people was not accomplished without a certain 
amount of opposition. Since one engine could do as much 
work as a hundred men, the ninety-nine others who were 
thrown out of employment did not like it. Frequently they at¬ 
tacked the factory buildings and set fire to the machines, but 
insurance companies had been organized as early as the 17th 
century and as a rule the owners were well protected against 
loss. 

Soon, newer and better machines were installed, the fac¬ 
tory was surrounded with a high wall, and there was an end 


401 


thp: story of mankind 


to the rioting. The ancient guilds could not possibly survive 
in this new world of steam and iron. They went out of exist¬ 
ence and then the workmen tried to organize regular labor 
unions. But the factory owners, who through their wealth 
could exercise great influence upon the politicians of the dif¬ 
ferent countries, went to the legislature and had laws passed 
which forbade the forming of such trade-unions, because they 
interfered with the “liberty of action” of the workingman. 



THE FACTORY 


Please do not think that the good members of Parliament 
who passed these laws were wicked tyrants. They were the 
true sons of the revolutionary period when everybody talked 
of “liberty” and when people often killed their neighbors be¬ 
cause they were mot quite as liberty-loving as they ought to 
have been. Since “liberty” was the foremost virtue of man, 
it was not right that labor unions should dictate to their mem¬ 
bers the hours during which they could work and the wages 
which thev must demand. The workman must at all times be 
“free to sell his services in the open market,” and the employer 
must be equally “free” to conduct his business as he saw fit. 











































THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 


405 


The days of the mercantile system, when the state had regu¬ 
lated the industrial life of the entire community, were coming 
to an end. The new idea of “freedom” insisted that the state 
stand entirely aside and let commerce take its course. 

The last half of the 18 th century had not merely been a 
time of intellectual and political doubt, but the old economic 
ideas, too, had been replaced by new ones which better suited the 
need of the hour. Several years before the French Revolution, 
Turgot, who, as we saw, was one of the unsuccessful ministers 
of finance of Louis XVI, had preached the novel doctrine 
of “economic liberty.” Turgot lived in a country which had 
suffered from too much red tape, too many regulations, too 
many officials trying to enforce too many laws. “Remove this 
official supervision,” he wrote; “let the people do as they please, 
and everything will be all right.” Soon his famous advice 
of “laissez faire” became the battle-cry around which the 
economists of that period rallied. 

At the same time in England, Adam Smith was working 
on his mighty volumes on the “Wealth of Nations,” which made 
another plea for “liberty” and the “natural rights of trade.” 
Thirty years later, after the fall of Napoleon, when the reac¬ 
tionary powers of Europe had gained their victory at Vienna, 
that same freedom which was denied to the people in their 
political relations was forced upon them in their industrial 
life. 


The general use of machinery, as I have said at the begin¬ 
ning of this chapter, proved to be of great advantage to the 
state. Wealth increased rapidly. The machine made it pos¬ 
sible for a single country, like England, to carry all the bur¬ 
dens of the great Napoleonic wars. The capitalists (the peo¬ 
ple who provided the money with which machines were bought) 
reaped enormous profits. They became ambitious and began 
to take an interest in politics. They tried to compete with the 
landed aristocracy, which still exercised great influence upon 
the government of most European countries. 

In England, where the members of Parliament were still 
elected according to a royal decree ol the yeai 126 o, and 


406 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


where a large number of recently created industrial centers were 
without representation, they brought about the passing of the 
Reform Bill of the year 1832, which changed the electoral 
system and gave the class of the factory owners more influ¬ 
ence upon the legislative body. This, however, caused great 
discontent among the millions of factory workers, who were 
left without any voice in the government. They too began 
an agitation for the right to vote. They put their demands 
down in a document which came to be known as the “People’s 
Charter.” The debates about this charter grew more and 
more violent. They had not yet come to an end when the revo¬ 
lutions of the year 1848 broke out. Frightened by the threat 
of a new outbreak of Jacobinism and violence, the English 
government placed the Duke of Wellington, who was now in 
his eightieth year, at the head of the army, and called for vol¬ 
unteers. London was placed in a state of siege and prepara¬ 
tions were made to suppress the coming revolution. 

But the Chartist movement killed itself through bad lead¬ 
ership and no acts of violence took place. The new class of 
wealthy factory owners slowly increased its hold upon the 
government, and the conditions of industrial life in the large 
cities continued to transform vast acres of pasture and wheat 
land into dreary slums, which guard the approach of every 
modern city. 


EMANCIPATION 


In the year 1831, just before the passing of the first Re¬ 
form Bill, Jeremy Bentham, the great English student of legis¬ 
lative methods and the most practical political reformer of that 
day, wrote to a friend: “The way to be comfortable is to 
make others comfortable. The way to make others comfort¬ 
able is to appear to love them. The way to appear to love them 
is to love them in reality.” Jeremy was an honest man. He 
said what he believed to be true. His opinions were shared by 
thousands of his countrymen. They felt responsible for the 
happiness of their less fortunate neighbors and they tried 
their very best to help them. And Heaven knows it was time 
that something be done! 

The ideal of “economic freedom” (the “laissez faire” of 
Turgot) had been necessary in the old society where medieval 
restrictions lamed all industrial effort. But this “liberty of 
action” which had been the highest law of the land had led to 
a terrible, yea, a frightful condition. The hours in the fac¬ 
tory were limited only by the physical strength of the work¬ 
ers. As long as a woman could sit before her loom, without 
fainting from fatigue, she was supposed to work. Children of 
five and six were taken to the cotton mills, to save them from 
the dangers of the street and a life of idleness. A law had 
been passed which forced the children of paupers to go to work 
or be punished by being chained to their machines. In return 
for their services they got enough bad food to keep them alive 
and a sort of pig sty in which they could rest at night. Often 


407 











408 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


they were so tired that they fell asleep at their jobs. To keep 
them awake a foreman with a whip made the rounds and beat 
them on the knuckles when it was necessary to bring them back 
to their duties. Of course, under these circumstances thousands 
of little children died. This was regrettable and the employers, 
who after all were human beings and not without a heart, sin¬ 
cerely wished that they could abolish “child labor.” But since 
man was “free,” it followed that children were “free” too. Be¬ 
sides, if Mr. Jones had tried to work his factory without the 
use of children of five and six, his rival, Mr. Stone, would have 
hired an extra supply of little boys and Jones would have been 
forced into bankruptcy. It was therefore impossible for Jones 
to do without child labor until such time as an act of Parlia¬ 
ment should forbid it for all employers. 

But as Parliament was no longer dominated by the old 
landed aristocracy (which had despised the upstart factory 
owners with their money bags and had treated them with open 
contempt), but was under control of the representatives from 
the industrial centers, and as long as the law did not allow 
workmen to combine in labor unions, very little was accom¬ 
plished. Of course the intelligent and decent people of that 
time were not blind to these terrible conditions. They were 
just helpless. Machinery had conquered the world by sur¬ 
prise, and it took a great many years and the efforts of thou¬ 
sands of noble men and women to make the machine what it 
ought to be—man’s servant, and not his master. 

Curiously enough, the first attack upon the outrageous sys¬ 
tem of employment which was then common in all parts of 
the world was made on behalf of the black slaves of Africa 
and America. Slavery had been introduced into the Ameri- 
can continent by the Spaniards. They had tried to use the 
Indians as laborers in the fields and in the mines, but the In¬ 
dians, when taken away from a life in the open, had lain down 
and died. To save them from extinction a kind-hearted priest 
had suggested that negroes be brought from Africa to do the 
work. The negroes were strong and could stand rough treat¬ 
ment. Besides, association with the white man would give 



EMANCIPATION 


409 


them a chance to learn Christianity, and in this way they would 
be able to save their souls, and so from every possible point of 
view it would be an excellent arrangement both for the kindly 
white man and for his ignorant black brother. But with the 
introduction of machinery there had been a greater demand for 
cotton and the negroes were forced to work harder than ever 
before, and they too, like the Indians, began to die under the 
treatment which they received at the hands of the overseers. 

Stories of incredible cruelty constantly found their way to 
Europe and in all countries men and women began to agitate 
for the abolition of slavery. In England, William Wilberforce 
and Zachary Macaulay (the father of the great historian whose 
history of England you must read if you want to know how 
wonderfully interesting a history hook can be) organized a 
society for the suppression of slavery. First of all they got a 
law passed which made “slave trading” illegal. After the year 
1840 there was not a single slave in any of the British colonies. 
The revolution of 1848 put an end to slavery in the French 
possessions. The Portuguese passed a law in the year 1858 
which promised all slaves their liberty in twenty years from 
date. The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863 and in the same 
year Tsar Alexander II returned to his serfs that liberty 
which had been taken away from them more than two centuries 
before. 

In the United States of America the question led to grave 
difficulties and a prolonged war. Although the Declaration 
of Independence had laid down the principle that “all men 
were created equal,” an exception had been made for those men 
and women whose skins were dark and who worked on the 
plantations of the Southern states. As time went on, the dislike 
of the people of the North for the institution of slavery in¬ 
creased and they made no secret of their feelings. The South¬ 
erners, however, claimed that they could not grow their cotton 
without slave labor, and for almost fifty years a mighty de¬ 
bate raged in Congress. 

The North remained obdurate and the South would not give 
in. When it appeared impossible to reach a compromise, the 


410 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Southern states threatened to leave the Union. It was a most 
dangerous point in the history of the Union. Many things 
“might” have happened. That they did not happen was the 
work of a very great and very good man. 

On the sixth of November of the year 1860, Abraham Lin¬ 
coln, an Illinois lawyer and a man who had made his own in¬ 
tellectual fortune, had been elected President by the Repub¬ 
licans, who were very strong in the anti-slavery states. He 
knew the evils of human bondage at first hand and his shrewd 
common sense told him that there was no room on the northern 
continent for two rival nations. When a number of Southern 
states seceded and formed the “Confederate States of Amer¬ 
ica,” Lincoln accepted the challenge. The Northern states 
were called upon for volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of 
young men responded with eager enthusiasm and there fol¬ 
lowed four years of bitter civil war. The South, following 
the brilliant leadership of Lee and Jackson, repeatedly de¬ 
feated the armies of the North. Then the economic strength 
of New England and the West began to tell. An unknown 
officer by the name of Grant arose from obscurity and became 
the Charles Martel of the great slave war. Without inter¬ 
ruption he hammered his mighty blows upon the crumbling 
defences of the South. Early in the year 1868 President 
Lincoln issued his “Emancipation Proclamation” which set all 
slaves free. In April of the year 1865 Lee surrendered the 
last of his brave armies at Appomattox. A few days later 
President Lincoln was murdered by a lunatic. But his work 
was done. With the exception of Cuba, which was still under 
Spanish domination, slavery had come to an end in every part 
of the civilized world. 

But while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount 
of liberty, the “free” workmen of Europe did not fare quite so 
well. Indeed, it is a matter of surprise to many contemporary 
writers and observers that the masses of workmen (the so- 
called proletariat) did not die out from sheer misery. They 
lived in dirty houses situated in miserable parts of the slums. 
They ate bad food. They received just enough schooling to 


EMANCIPATION 


411 


fit them for their tasks. In case of death or an accident, their 
families were not provided for. But the brewery and distillery 
interests, who could exercise great influence upon the legis¬ 
lature, encouraged them to forget their woes by offering them 
unlimited quantities of whiskey and gin at very cheap rates. 

The enormous improvement which has taken place since the 
’thirties and the ’forties of the last century is not due to the ef¬ 
forts of a single man. The best brains of two generations de¬ 
voted themselves to the task of saving the world from the dis¬ 
astrous results of the all-too-sudden introduction of machinery. 
They did not try to destroy the capitalistic system. This would 
have been very foolish, for the accumulated wealth of other 
people, when intelligently used, may be of very great benefit 
to all mankind. But they tried to combat the notion that true 
equality can exist between the man who has wealth and owns 
the factories and can close their doors at will without the risk 
of going hungry, and the laborer who must take whatever job 
is offered, at whatever wage he can get, or face the risk of star¬ 
vation for himself, his wife, and his children. 

They endeavored to introduce a number of laws which reg¬ 
ulated the relations between the factory owners and the fac¬ 
tory workers. In this, the reformers have been increasingly 
successful in all countries. To-day, the majority of the labor¬ 
ers are well protected; their hours are being reduced to the 
excellent average of eight, and their children are sent to the 
schools instead of to the mine pit and to the carding-room of 
the cotton mills. 

But there were other men who also contemplated the sight 
of all the belching smokestacks, who heard the rattle of the 
railroad trains, who saw the storehouses filled with a surplus 
of all sorts of materials, and who wondered to what ultimate 
goal this tremendous activity would lead in the years to come. 
They remembered that the human race had lived for hundreds 
of thousands of years without commercial and industrial com¬ 
petition. Could they change the existing order of things and 
do away with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed 
human happiness to profits? 


412 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


This idea—this vague hope for a better day—was not re¬ 
stricted to a single country. In England, Robert Owen, the 
owner of many cotton mills, established a so-called “socialistic 
community” which was a success. But when he died, the pros¬ 
perity of New Lanark came to an end and an attempt of 
Louis Blanc, a French journalist, to establish “social work¬ 
shops” all over France fared no better. Indeed, the increasing 
number of socialistic writers soon began to see that little in¬ 
dividual communities which remained outside of the regular 
industrial life would never be able to accomplish anything at 
all. It was necessary to study the fundamental principles un¬ 
derlying the whole industrial and capitalistic society before 
useful remedies could be suggested. 

The practical Socialists like Robert Owen and Louis Blanc 
and Francois Fournier were succeeded by theoretical students 
of socialism like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of these 
two, Marx is the better known. lie was a very brilliant Jew 
whose family had for a long time lived in Germany. He had 
heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he began to 
interest himself in questions of labor and wages and unem¬ 
ployment. But his liberal views made him very unpopular 
with the police authorities of Germany, and he was forced to 
flee to Brussels and then to London, where he lived a poor and 
shabby life as the correspondent of the New York Tribune. 

No one, thus far, had paid much attention to his books on 
economic subjects. But in the year 1864 he organized the first 
international association of workingmen and three years later, 
in 1867, he published the first volume of his well-known trea¬ 
tise called “Capital.” Marx believed that all history was a 
long struggle between those who “have” and those who “don’t 
have.” The introduction and general use of machinery had 
created a new class in society, that of the capitalists who used 
their surplus wealth to buy the tools which were then used by 
the laborers to produce still more wealth, which was again used 
to build more factories and so on, until the end of time. Mean¬ 
while, according to Marx, the third estate (the bourgeoisie) 
was growing richer and richer and the fourth estate (the prole- 




EMANCIPATION 


413 


tariat) was growing poorer and poorer, and lie predicted that 
in the end, one man would possess all the wealth of the world 
while the others would he his employees and dependent upon 
his good will. 

To prevent such a state of affairs, Marx advised working¬ 
men of all countries to unite and to strive for a number of 
political and economic measures which he had enumerated in a 
Manifesto in the year 1848, the year of the last great Euro¬ 
pean revolution. 

These views of course were very unpopular with the gov¬ 
ernments of Europe. Many countries, especially Prussia, 
passed severe laws against the Socialists, and policemen were 
ordered to break up the Socialist meetings and to arrest the 
speakers. But that sort of persecution never does any good. 
Martyrs are the best possible advertisements for an unpopular 
cause. In Europe the number of Socialists steadily increased, 
and it was soon clear that the Socialists did not contemplate a 
violent revolution hut were using their increasing power in the 
different parliaments to promote the interests of the laboring 
classes. Socialists were even called upon to act as cabinet 
ministers, and they cooperated with progressive Catholics and 
Protestants to undo the damage that had been caused by the 
Industrial Revolution and to bring about a fairer division of 
the many benefits which had followed the introduction of ma¬ 
chinery and the increased production of wealth. 


THE AGE OF SCIENCE 


The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the 
Greeks, and the Romans had all contributed something to the 
first vague notions of science and scientific investigation. But 
the great migrations of the fourth century had destroyed the 

classical world of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, and the Christian 
Church, which was more inter¬ 
ested in the life of the soul than 
in the life of the body, had re¬ 
garded science as a manifestation 
of that human arrogance which 
wanted to pry into divine affairs 
that belonged to the realm of Al¬ 
mighty God, and which therefore 
was closely related to the seven 
deadly sins. 

The Renaissance to a certain 
but limited extent had broken 
through this wall of medieval prejudices. The Reformation, 
however, which had overtaken the Renaissance in the early 16th 
century, had been hostile to the ideals of the “new civilization/’ 
and once more the men of science were threatened with severe 
punishment should they try to pass beyond the narrow limits 
of knowledge which had been laid down in Holy Writ. 



414 






















THE AGE OF SCIENCE 


415 


Our world is filled with the statues of great generals, atop 
of prancing horses, leading their cheering soldiers to glorious 
victory. Here and there, a modest slab of marble announces 
that a man of science has found his final resting place. A thou¬ 
sand years from now we shall probably do these things differ¬ 
ently, and the children of that happy generation will know 
of the splendid courage and devotion to duty of the men who 
were the pioneers of knowledge, which alone has made our 
modern world a practical possibility. 

Many of these scientific pioneers suffered poverty and con¬ 
tempt and humiliation. They lived in garrets and died in dun¬ 
geons. They dared not print their names on the title pages of 
their books and they dared not print their conclusions in the 
land of their birth, but smuggled the manuscripts to some secret 
printing shop in Amsterdam or Haarlem. They were exposed 
to the bitter enmity of the Church, both Protestant and Catho¬ 
lic, and were the subjects of endless sermons inciting the par¬ 
ishioners to violence against the “heretics.” 

Here and there they found an asylum. In Holland, where 
the spirit of tolerance was strongest, the authorities, while re¬ 
garding these scientific investigations with little favor, yet 
refused to interfere with people’s freedom of thought. It be¬ 
came a little asylum for intellectual liberty where French and 
English and German philosophers and mathematicians and 
physicians could go to enjoy a short spell of rest and get a 
breath of free air. 

In another chapter I have told you how Roger Bacon, the 
great genius of the thirteenth century, was prevented for years 
from writing a single word, lest he get into new troubles with 
the authorities of the Church. And five hundred years later, the 
contributors to the great philosophic “Encyclopaedia” were un¬ 
der the constant supervision of the French gendarmerie. Half 
a century afterward, Darwin, who dared to question the story 
of the creation of man as revealed in the Bible, was severely 
denounced from many pulpits. Even to-day, the persecution 
of those who venture into the unknown realm of science has 


416 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


not entirely come to an end. And while I am writing this 
Mr. Bryan is addressing a vast multitude on the “Menace 
of Darwinism,” warning his hearers against the errors of 

the great English naturalist. 

All this, however, is a mere 
detail. The work that has to 
be done invariably gets done, 
and the ultimate profit of the 
discoveries and the inventions 
goes to the mass of those same 
people who have always decried 
the man of vision as an unprac¬ 
tical idealist. 

The seventeenth centurv 
had still preferred to investi¬ 
gate the far-off heavens and to 
study the position of our planet 
in relation to the solar system. 
Even so, the Church had disap¬ 
proved of this unseemly curi¬ 
osity, and Copernicus, who 
proved that the sun was the cen¬ 
ter of the solar system, did not publish his work until the day 
of his death. Galileo spent the greater part of his life under the 
supervision of the clerical authorities, but he continued to use 
his telescope and provided Isaac Newton with a mass of prac¬ 
tical observations which greatly helped the English mathema¬ 
tician when he discovered the existence of that interesting* habit 

CD 

of falling objects which came to be known as the Law of 
Gravitation. 

That, for the moment at least, exhausted the interest in the 
heaven’s, and man began to study the earth. The invention 
of a workable microscope, a strange and clumsy little thing, 
during the last half of the 17th century gave man a chance to 
study the “microscopic” creatures who are responsible for so 
many of his ailments. It laid the foundations of the science of 
“bacteriology,” which in the last forty years has delivered the 
















THE AGE OF SCIENCE 


417 


world from a great number of diseases by discovering the tiny 
organisms by which they are caused. It also allowed the geol¬ 
ogists to make a more careful study of different rocks and of 
the fossils (the petrified prehistoric plants and animals) which 
they found deep below the surface of the earth. These inves¬ 
tigations convinced them that the earth must be a great deal 
older than was stated in the book of Genesis, and in the year 
1830 Sir Charles Lyell published his “Principles of Geology,” 
which denied the story of creation as related in the Bible and 
gave a far more wonderful description of slow growth and 
gradual development. 

At the same time, the Marquis de Laplace was working on 
a new theory of creation, which made the earth a little blotch 
in the nebulous sea out of which the planetary system had 
been formed; and Bunsen and Ivirchhoff, by the use of the spec¬ 
troscope, were investigating the chemical composition of the 
stars and of our good neighbor, the sun, whose curious spots 
had first been noticed by Galileo. 

Meanwhile, after a most bitter and relentless warfare with 
the clerical authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the 
anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission 
to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our 
organs and their habits for the guesswork of the medieval 
quack. 

Within a single generation (between 1810 and 1840) more 
progress was made in every branch of science than in all the 
hundreds of thousands of years that had passed since man first 
looked at the stars and wondered why they were there. It 
must have been a very sad age for the people who had been 
educated under the old system. And we can understand their 
feeling of hatred for such men as Lamarck and Darwin, who 
did not exactly tell them that they were “descended from 
monkeys”—an accusation which our grandfathers seemed to 
regard as a personal insult—but who suggested that the proud 
human race had evolved from a long series of ancestors who 
could trace the family-tree back to the little jellyfishes that 
were among the first inhabitants of our planet. 





THE DIRIGIBLE 























THE AGE OF SCIENCE 


419 


The dignified world of the well-to-do middle class, which 
dominated the nineteenth century, was willing to make use 
of the gas or the electric light—of all the many practical appli¬ 
cations of the great scientific discoveries; hut the mere inves¬ 
tigator, the man of the '‘scientific theory” without whom no 
progress would he possible, continued to he distrusted until 
very recently. Then, at last, his services were recognized. To¬ 
day the rich people, who in past ages donated their wealth for 
the building of a cathedral, construct vast laboratories where 
silent men do battle upon the hidden enemies of mankind and 
often sacrifice their lives that coming generations may enjoy 
greater happiness and health. 

Indeed it has come to pass that many of the ills of this 
world, which our ancestors regarded as inevitable “acts of 
God,” have been exposed as manifestations of our own igno¬ 
rance and neglect. Every child nowadays knows that he can 
keep from getting typhoid fever by a little care in the choice of 
his drinking water. But it took years and years of hard 
work before the doctors could convince the people of this fact. 
Few of us now fear the dentist chair. A study of the mi¬ 
crobes that live in our mouths has made it possible to keep our 
teeth from decay. Must perchance a tooth he pulled, then we 
take a sniff of gas, and go our way rejoicing. When the news¬ 
papers of the year 1864 brought the story of the “painless 
operation” which had been performed in America with the help 
of ether, the good people of Europe shook their heads. To 
them it seemed against the will of God that man should escape 
the pain which was the share of all mortals, and a long time 
passed before the use of anaesthetics became general. 

But the battle of progress had been won. The breach in the 
old walls of prejudice was growing larger and larger, and as 
time went by, the ancient stones of ignorance came crumbling 
down. The eager crusaders of a new and happier social order 
rushed forward. Suddenly they found themselves facing a new 
obstacle. Out of the ruins of a long-gone past, another citadel 
of reaction had been erected, and millions of men had to give 
their lives before this last bulwark was destroyed. 



ART 


When a baby is perfectly healthy and has had enough to eat 
and has slept all it wants, then it hums a little tune to show how 
happy it is. To grown-ups this humming means nothing. It 
sounds like “goo-zum, goo-zum, goo-o-o-o-o,” but to the baby 
it is perfect music. It is his first contribution to art. 

As soon as he (or she) gets a little older and is able to sit 
up, the period of mud pie making begins. These mud pies do 
not interest the outside world. There are too many million 
babies, making too many million mud pies at the same time. 
But to the small infant they represent another expedition into 
the pleasant realm of art. The baby is now a sculptor. 

At the age of three or four, when the hands begin to obey 
the brain, the child becomes a painter. Ilis fond mother gives 
him a box of colored chalks and every loose bit of paper is 
rapidly covered with strange pothooks and scrawls which rep¬ 
resent houses and horses and terrible naval battles. 

Soon, however, this happiness of just “making things” 
comes to an end. School begins and the greater part of the 
day is filled up with work. The business of living becomes 
the most important event in the life of every boy and girl. 
There is little time left for “art” between learning the tables of 
multiplication and the past participles of the irregular French 
verbs. And unless the desire for making certain things for 
the mere pleasure of creating them without any hope of a 


420 









ART 


421 


practical return be very strong, the child grows into manhood 
and forgets that the first five years of his life were devoted 
mainlv to art. 

Nations are not different from children. As soon as the 
cave man had escaped the threatening dangers of the long and 
shivering ice period, and had put his house in order, he began 
to make certain things which he thought beautiful, although 
they were of no earthly use to him in his fight with the wild 
animals of the jungle. He covered the walls of his grotto with 
pictures of the elephants and the deer that he hunted, and out of 
a piece of stone lie hacked the rough figures of those women he 
thought most attractive. 

As soon as the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the 
Persians and all the other people of the East had founded 
their little countries along the Nile and the Euphrates, they 
began to build magnificent palaces for their kings, invented 
bright pieces of jewelry for their women, and planted gardens 
which sang happy songs of color with their many bright 
flowers. 

Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the dis¬ 
tant Asiatic prairies, enjoying a free and easy existence as 
fighters and hunters, composed songs which celebrated the 
mighty deeds of their great leaders and invented a form of 
poetry that has survived until our own day. A thousand years 
later, when they had established themselves on the Greek main- 
land, and had built their “city-states,” they expressed their 
joy (and their sorrows) in magnificent temples, in statues, in 
comedies and in tragedies, and in every conceivable form of 
art. 

The Romans, like their Carthaginian rivals, were too busy 
administering other people and making money to have much 
love for “useless and unprofitable” adventures of the spirit. 
They conquered the world and built roads and bridges, but they 
borrowed their art wholesale from the Greeks. They invented 
certain practical forms of architecture which answered the 
demands of their day and age. But their statues and their his¬ 
tories and their mosaics and their poems were mere Latin imi- 


422 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


tations of Greek originals. Without that vague and hard-to- 
define something which the world calls “personality,” there can 
be no art, and the Roman world distrusted personality. The 
empire needed efficient soldiers and tradesmen. The business 
of writing poetry or making pictures was left to foreigners. 

Then came the Dark Ages. The barbarian was the prover¬ 
bial bull in the chinashop of western Europe. He had no use 
for what he did not understand. Speaking in terms of the year 
1921, he liked the magazine covers of pretty ladies, but threw 
the Rembrandt etchings which he had inherited into the ash- 
can. Soon he came to learn better. Then he tried to undo the 
damage which he had created a few years before. But the ash- 
cans were gone and so were the pictures. 

By this time, his own art, which he had brought with him 
from the East, had developed into something very beautiful. 
He made up for his past neglect and indifference by the so- 
called “art of the middle ages,” which as far as northern Eu¬ 
rope is concerned was a product of the Germanic mind and had 
borrowed hut little from the Greeks and the Latins and nothing 
at all from the older forms of art of Egypt and Assyria. In¬ 
deed, so little had the northern races been influenced by their 
southern neighbors that their own architectural products were 
completely misunderstood by the people of Italy and were 
treated by them with downright and unmitigated contempt. 

You have all heard the word Gothic. You probably asso¬ 
ciate it with the picture of a lovely old cathedral, lifting its 
slender spires toward high heaven. But what does the word 
really mean? 

It means something “uncouth” and “barbaric”—something 
which one might expect from an “uncivilized Goth,” a rough 
backwoodsman who had no respect for the established rules of 
classical art and who built his “modern horrors” to please his 
own low tastes without a decent regard for the examples of 
the Forum and the Acropolis. 

And yet for several centuries this form of Gothic architec¬ 
ture was the highest expression of the sincere feeling for art 
which inspired the whole of northern Europe. From a pre- 


ART 


423 


vious chapter, you will remember how the people of the late 
middle ages lived. Unless they were peasants and dwelt in vil¬ 
lages, they were citizens of a “city” or “civitas,” the old Latin 
name for a tribe. And indeed, behind their high walls and 
their deep moats, these good burghers were true tribesmen who 
shared the common dangers and enjoyed the common safety 
and prosperity that they derived from their system of mutual 
protection. 

In the old Greek and Roman cities the market place, where 
the temple stood, had been the center of civic life. During 
the middle ages, the church, the House of God, became such a 
center. We modern Protestant people, who go to our church 
only once a week, and then for a few hours only, hardly know 
what a medieval church meant to the community. Then, be¬ 
fore you were a week old, you were taken to the church to be 
baptized. As a child, you visited the church to learn the holy 
stories of the Scriptures. Later on you became a member 
of the congregation, and if you were rich enough you built 
yourself a separate little chapel sacred to the memory of the 
Patron Saint of your own family. As for the sacred edifice, 
it was open at all hours of the day and many of the night. In 
a certain sense it resembled a modern club, dedicated to all the 
inhabitants of the town. In the church you very likely caught 
a first glimpse of the girl who was to become your bride at a 
great ceremony before the High Altar. And finally, when the 
end of the journey had come, you were buried beneath the 
stones of this familiar building, that all vour children and their 
grandchildren might pass over your grave until the Day of 
Judgment. 

Because the church was not only the House of God hut 
also the true center of all common life, the building had to be 
different from anything that had ever been constructed by 
the hands of man. The temple of the Egyptians and the 
Greeks and the Romans had been merely the shrine of a local 
divinity. As no sermons were preached before the images of 
Osiris or Zeus or Jupiter, it was not necessary that the interior 
offer a space for a great multitude. All the religious proces- 


424 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


sions of the old Mediterranean peoples took place in the open. 
But in the north, where the weather was usually had, most 
functions were held under the roof of the church. 

During many centuries the architects struggled with this 
problem of constructing a building that was large enough. The 

Roman tradition taught 
them how to build heavy 
stone walls with very small 
windows lest the walls lose 
their strength. On the top 
of this they then placed a 
heavy stone roof. But in 
the twelfth century, after 
the beginning of the Cru¬ 
sades, when the architects 
had seen the pointed arches 
of the Mohammedan build¬ 
ers, the western builders 
discovered a new style which 
gave them their first chance 
to make the sort of building 
that those days of an in¬ 
tense religious life demand¬ 
ed. And then they devel¬ 
oped this strange style upon 
which the Italians bestowed 
the contemptuous name of 
“ Gothic’ ’ or barbaric. Tliev 
achieved their purpose by 
inventing a vaulted roof 
supported by “ribs.” But 
such a roof, if it became too 
heavy, was apt to break the 
walls, just as a man of three hundred pounds sitting down upon 
a child’s chair will force it to collapse. To overcome this dif¬ 
ficulty, certain French architects then began to reinforce the 
walls with “buttresses,” which were merely heavy masses of 


ine 

TVm 7 




me kjall 

Ju p Tl/v*i 

The 

Roof Has 
To fAuU 

This VO Avj 



GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 





































ART 


425 


stone against which the walls could lean while they supported 
the roof. And to assure the further safety of the roof they 
supported the ribs by so-called ‘'flying buttresses,” a very 
simple method of construction which you will understand at 
once when you look at our picture. 

This new method of construction allowed the introduction 
of enormous windows. In the twelfth century glass was still 
an expensive curiosity, and very few private buildings pos¬ 
sessed glass windows. Fortunately, the art of making colored 
glass, with which the ancient people of the Mediterranean had 
been familiar, had not been entirely lost. There was a revival 
of stained glass making, and soon the windows of the Gothic 
churches told the stories of the Holy Book in little bits of bril¬ 
liantly colored windowpane, caught in a long framework of 
lead. 

Behold, therefore, the new and glorious House of God, 
filled with an eager multitude, “living” its religion as no people 
have ever done either before or since! Nothing is considered 
too good or too costly or too wondrous for this House of 
God and Home of Man. The sculptors, who since the destruc¬ 
tion of the Roman Empire have been out of employment, halt¬ 
ingly return to their noble art. Portals and pillars and but¬ 
tresses and cornices are all covered with carven images of Our 
Lord and the blessed Saints. The embroiderers too are set to 
work to make tapestries for the walls. The jewelers offer their 
highest art that the shrine of the altar may be worthy of com¬ 
plete adoration. Even the painter does his best. But poor 
man, he is greatly handicapped by lack of a suitable medium. 

And thereby hangs a story. The Romans of the early 
Christian period had covered the floors and the walls of their 
temples and houses with mosaics—pictures made of colored 
bits of glass. But this art had been exceedingly difficult. It 
gave the painter no chance to express all he wanted to say, as 
all children know who have ever tried to make figures out of 
colored blocks of wood. The art of mosaic painting therefore 
died out during the late middle ages except in Russia, where 
the Byzantine mosaic painters had found a refuge after the 



426 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


fall of Constantinople and continued to ornament the walls 
of the orthodox churches until the dav of the Bolsheviki, when 
there was an end to the building of churches. 

Of course, the medieval painter could mix his colors with 
the water of the wet plaster that was put upon the walls of 
the churches. This method of painting upon “fresh plaster” 
(which was generally called “fresco” or “fresh” painting) 
was very popular for many centuries. To-day it is as rare 
as the art of painting miniatures in manuscripts, and among 
the hundreds of artists of a modern city there is perhaps one 
who can handle this medium successfully. But during the 
middle ages there was no other way and the artists were 
“fresco” workers for lack of something better. The method, 
however, had certain great disadvantages. Very often the 
plaster came off the walls after only a few years, or dampness 
spoiled the pictures, just as dampness will spoil the pattern 
of our wall paper. People tried every imaginable expedient 
to get away from this plaster background. They tried to mix 
their colors with wine and vinegar and with honey and with 
the sticky white of egg, but none of these methods was satis¬ 
factory. For more than a thousand years these experiments 
continued. In painting pictures uj:>on the parchment leaves 
of manuscripts the medieval artists were very successful. But 
when it came to covering large spaces of wood or stone with 
paint which would stick, they did not succeed very well. 

At last, during the first half of the fifteenth century, the 
problem was solved in the southern Netherlands by Jan and 
Hubert van Eyck. The famous Flemish brothers mixed their 
paint with specially prepared oils and this allowed them to use 
wood and canvas or stone or anything else as a background for 
their pictures. 

But by this time the religious ardor of the early middle 
ages was a thing of the past. The rich burghers of the cities 
were succeeding the bishops as patrons of the arts. And as 
art invariably follows the full dinner-pail, the artists now began 
to work for these worldly employers and painted pictures for 
kings, for grand dukes, and for rich hankers. Within a very 


ART 


427 


short time, the new method of painting with oil spread through 
Europe, and in every country there developed a school of 
special painting which showed the characteristic tastes of the 
people for whom the portraits and landscapes were made. 

In Spain, for example, Velasquez painted court dwarfs 
and the weavers of the royal tapestry-factories, and all sorts 
of persons and subjects connected with the king and his court. 
But in Holland, Rembrandt and Frans Hals and Vermeer 
painted the barnyard of the merchant’s house, and they painted 
his rather dowdy wife and his healthy but bumptious children 
and the ships which had brought him his wealth. In Italy, on 
the other hand, where the pope remained the largest patron 
of the arts, Michelangelo and Correggio continued to paint 
Madonnas and Saints; while in England, where the aristocracy 
was very rich and powerful, and in France, where the kings 
had become uppermost in the state, the artists painted dis¬ 
tinguished gentlemen who were members of the government 
and very lovely ladies who were friends of His Majesty. 

The great change in painting which came about with the 
neglect of the old church and the rise of a new class in society 
was reflected in all other forms of art. The invention of print¬ 
ing had made it possible for authors to win fame and reputa¬ 
tion by writing books for the multitudes. In this way arose 
the profession of the novelist and the illustrator. But the 
people who had money enough to buy the new books were not 
the sort who liked to sit at home of nights, looking at the ceiling 
or just sitting. They wanted to be amused. The few minstrels 
of the middle ages were not sufficient to cover the demand for 
entertainment. For the first time since the early Greek city- 
states of two thousand years before, the professional play¬ 
wright had a chance to ply his trade. The middle ages had 
known the theater merely as part of certain church celebra¬ 
tions. The tragedies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
had told the story of the suffering of Our Lord. But during 
the sixteenth century the worldly theater made its reappear¬ 
ance. It is true that, at first, the position of the professional 
playwright and actor was not sc very high one. William 


428 


THE STORY. OF MANKIND 


Shakespeare was regarded as a sort of circus-fellow who 
amused his neighbors with his tragedies and comedies. But 
when he died in the year 1616 he had begun to enjoy the respect 
of his neighbors, and actors were no longer subjects of police 
supervision. 

William’s contemporary, Lope de Vega, the incredible 
Spaniard who wrote no less than 1800 worldly and 400 reli¬ 
gious plays, was a person of rank who received the papal ap¬ 
proval upon his work. A century later, Moliere, the French¬ 
man, was deemed worthy of the companionship of none less 
than King Louis XIV. 

Since then the theater has enjoyed an ever-increasing af¬ 
fection on the part of the people. To-day a “theater” is part 
of every well regulated city, and the “silent drama” of the 
movies has penetrated to the tiniest of our prairie hamlets. 

Another art, however, was to become the most popular of 
all. That was music. Most of the old art forms demanded a 
great deal of technical skill. It takes years and years of prac¬ 
tice before our clumsy hand is able to follow the commands of 
the brain and reproduce our vision upon canvas or in marble. 
It takes many years to learn how to act or how to write a good 
novel. And it takes a great deal of training on the part of the 
public to appreciate the best in painting and writing and sculp¬ 
ture. But almost anyone, not entirely tone-deaf, can follow 
a tune, and almost everybody can get enjoyment out of some 
sort of music. The middle ages had heard a little music, but 
it had been entirely the music of the church. The holy chants 
were subject to very severe laws of rhythm and harmony and 
soon these became monotonous. Besides, they could not well 
be sung in the street or in the market place. 

The Renaissance changed this. Music once more came 
into its own as the best friend of man, both in his happiness and 
in his sorrows. 

The Egyptians and the Babylonians and the ancient Jews 
had all been great lovers of music. They had even combined 
different instruments into regular orchestras. But the Greeks 


ART 


429 


had frowned upon this barbaric foreign noise. They liked to 
hear a man recite the stately poetry of Homer and Pindar. 
They allowed him to accompany himself upon the lyre (the 
poorest of all stringed instru¬ 
ments) . That was as far as any- 
one could go without incurring 
the risk of popular disapproval. 

The Romans on the other hand 
had loved orchestral music at 
their dinners and parties and 
they had invented most of the 
instruments which (in very 
modified form) we use to-dav. 

The early church had despised 
this music, which smacked too 
much of the wicked pagan 
world that had just been de¬ 
stroyed. A few songs rendered 
by the entire congregation were 
all that the bishops of the third 
and fourth centuries would tolerate. As the congregation 
was apt to sing dreadfully out of key without the guidance of 
an instrument, the church had afterward allowed the use of 
an organ, an invention of the second century of our era which 
consisted of a combination of the old pipes of Pan and a pair 
of bellows. 

Then came the great migrations. The last of the Roman 
musicians were either killed or became tramp fiddlers going 
from city to city and playing in the street, and begging for 
pennies like the harpist on a modern ferryboat. 

But the revival of a more worldly civilization in the cities 
of the late middle ages had created a new demand for musi¬ 
cians. Instruments like the horn, which had been used onlv 
as signal instruments for hunting and fighting, were remodeled 
until they could reproduce sounds which were agreeable in the 
dance hall and in the banqueting room. A bow strung with 
horsehair was used to play the old-fashioned guitar; and be- 











430 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


fore the end of the middle ages this six-stringed instrument 
(the most ancient of all string instruments dating back to 
Egypt and Assyria) had grown into our modern four-stringed 
fiddle. Stradivarius and the other Italian violin makers of 
the eighteenth century brought it to the height of perfection. 

And finally the modern piano was invented, the most wide¬ 
spread of all musical instruments, which has followed man into 
the wilderness of the jungle and the ice-fields of Greenland. 
The organ had been the first of all keyed instruments, but the 
performer always depended upon the cooperation of someone 
who worked the bellows, a job which nowadays is done by elec- 

tricitv. The musicians therefore looked for a handier and less 
%/ 

circumstantial instrument to assist them in training the pupils 
of the many church choirs. During the great eleventh century, 
Guido, a Benedictine monk, gave us our modern system of 
musical notation. Sometime during that century, when there 
was a great deal of popular interest in music, the first instru¬ 
ment with both keys and strings was built. It must have 
sounded as tinkly as one of those tiny children’s pianos which 
you can buy at every toyshop. In the city of Vienna, the 
town where the strolling musicians of the middle ages (who 
had been classed with jugglers and card sharps) had formed 
the first separate guild of musicians in the year 1288, the little 
monochord was developed into something which we can rec¬ 
ognize as the direct ancestor of our modern Steinway. From 
Austria the “clavichord,” as it was usually called in those 
days (because it had “claves” or keys), went to Italy. There 
it was perfected into the “spinet,” which was so called after 
the inventor, Giovanni Spinetti of Venice. At last, sometime 
between 1709 and 1720, Bartolomeo Cristofori made a “clavier” 
which allowed the performer to play both loudly and softly, 
or as it was said in Italian, “piano” and “forte.” This instru¬ 
ment with certain changes became our “pianoforte” or piano. 

Then for the first time the world possessed an easy and con¬ 
venient instrument which could he mastered in a couple of years 
and did not need the eternal tuning of harps and fiddles and 
was much pleasanter to the ears than the medieval tubas, clari- 


ART 


431 


nets, trombones, and oboes. Just as the phonograph has given 
millions of modern people their first love of music, so did the 
early “pianoforte” carry the knowledge of music into much 
wider circles. Music became part of the education of every 
well-bred man and woman. Princes and rich merchants main¬ 
tained private orchestras. The musician ceased to he a wander¬ 
ing “jongleur” and became a highly valued member of the com¬ 
munity. Music was added to the dramatic performances of 
the theater and out of this practice grew our modern opera. 
Originally only a few very rich princes could afford the ex¬ 
penses of an “opera troupe.” But, as the taste for this sort of 
entertainment grew, many cities built their own theaters where 
Italian and afterward German operas were given to the un¬ 
limited joy of the whole community with the exception of a few 
sects of very strict Christians who still regarded music with 
deep suspicion as something which was too lovely to be entirely 
good for the soul. 

By the middle of the eighteenth century the musical life 
of Europe was in full swing. Then there came forward a 
man who was greater than all others, a simple organist of the 
Thomas Church of Leipzig, by the name of Johann Sebastian 
Bach. In his compositions for every known instrument, from 
comic songs and popular dances to the most stately of sacred 
hymns and oratorios, he laid the foundation for all our modern 
music. When he died in the year 1750 he was succeeded bv 
Mozart, who created musical fabrics of sheer loveliness which 
remind us of lace that has been woven out of harmony and 
rhythm. Then came Ludwig von Beethoven, the most tragic 
of men, who gave us our modern orchestra, yet heard none of 
his greatest compositions because he was deaf as the result of a 
cold contracted during his years of poverty. 

Beethoven lived through the period of the great French 
Revolution. Full of hope for a new and glorious day, he had 
dedicated one of his symphonies to Napoleon. But he lived 
to regret the hour. When he died in the year 1827, Napoleon 
was gone and the French Revolution was gone, but the steam 
engine had come and was filling the world with a sound that 


432 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


had nothing in common with the dreams of the Third Sym¬ 
phony. 

Indeed, the new order of steam and iron and coal and large 
factories had little use for art, for painting and sculpture and 
poetry and music. The old protectors of the arts, the Church 
and the princes and the merchants of the middle ages and the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no longer existed. The 
leaders of the new industrial world were too busy and had too 
little education to bother about etchings and sonatas and hits 
of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those 
things and who were of no practical use to the community in 
which thev lived. And the workmen in the factories listened 
to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste 
for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. 
The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. 
Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings 
had been left were dying a slow death in the museums. And 
music became a monopoly of a few “virtuosi” who took the 
music away from the home and carried it to the concert hall. 

But steadity, although slowly, the arts are coming back into 
their own. People begin to understand that Rembrandt and 
Beethoven and Rodin are the true prophets and leaders of 
their race and that a world without art and happiness resem¬ 
bles a nursery without laughter. 


COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 


To the great majority of people who lived during the latter 
half of the nineteenth century the world seemed to have en¬ 
tered an era of quiet, of happiness, and of prosperity. More 
of the greater powers ceased to be mere political agencies and 
became large business enterprises. They built railroads. They 
founded and subsidized steamship lines to all parts of the 
world. They connected their different possessions with tele¬ 
graph wires. And they steadily increased their holdings in 
other continents. Every available bit of African or Asiatic 
territory was claimed by one of the rival powers. France be¬ 
came a colonial nation with interests in Algiers and Madagas¬ 
car. Germany claimed parts of southwest and east Africa, 
built settlements in Kameroon on the west coast of Africa 
and in New Guinea and many of the islands of the Pacific, 
and used the murder of a few missionaries as a welcome excuse 
to take the harbor of Kiaochau on the Yellow Sea in China. 
Italy tried her luck in Abyssinia, was disastrously defeated by 
the soldiers of the Negus, and consoled herself by occupying 
the Turkish possessions in Tripoli in northern Africa. Russia, 
having occupied all of Siberia, took Port Arthur away from 
China. Japan, having defeated China in the war of 1895, oc¬ 
cupied the island of Formosa and in the year 1905 began to 
lay claim to the entire empire of Korea. In the year 1883 
England, the largest colonial empire the world has ever seen, 
undertook to “protect” Egypt. She performed this task most 


433 








434 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


efficiently and to the great material benefit of that much ne¬ 
glected country, which ever since the opening of the Suez 
canal in 1868 had been threatened with a foreign invasion. 
During the next thirty years she fought a number of colonial 
wars in different jDarts of the world and in 1902 (after three 
years of bitter fighting) she conquered the independent Boer 
republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Mean¬ 
while she had encouraged Cecil Rhodes to lay the foundations 
for a great African state, which reached from the Cape almost 
to the mouth of the Nile, and had faithfully picked up such 
islands or provinces as had been left without a European 
owner. 

The shrewd king of Belgium, by name Leopold, used the 
discoveries of Henry Stanley to found the Congo Free State 
in the year 1885. Originally this gigantic tropical empire 
was an “absolute monarchy.” But after many years of scan¬ 
dalous mismanagement it was annexed by the Belgian people. 
Thev made it a colony in the year 1908 and abolished the ter- 
rible abuses that had been tolerated by Leopold, who cared 
nothing for the fate of the natives as long as he got his ivory 
and rubber. 

As for the United States, they had so much land that they 
desired no further territory. But the terrible misrule of Cuba, 
one of the last of the Spanish possessions in the western hemi¬ 
sphere, practically forced the Washington government to take 
action. After a short and rather uneventful war, the Spaniards 
were driven out of Cuba and Porto Rico and the Philippines, 
and the two latter became colonies of the United States. 

This development of empires was perfectly natural. The 
increasing number of factories in England and France and 
Germany needed an ever-increasing amount of raw materials 
and the equally increasing number of European workers needed 
an ever-increasing amount of food. Everywhere the cry was 
for more and for richer markets, for more easily accessible coal 
mines and iron mines and rubber plantations and oil wells, for 
greater supplies of wheat and grain. 

The purely political events of the European continent 


COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 


435 


dwindled to mere insignificance in the eyes of men who were 
making plans for steamboat lines on Victoria Nyanza or for 
railroads through the interior of Shantung. They knew that 
many European questions still remained to be settled, but 
they did not bother, and through sheer indifference and care¬ 
lessness they bestowed upon their descendants a terrible inher¬ 
itance of hate and misery. For untold centuries the south-east- 
ern corner of Europe had been the scene of rebellion and blood¬ 
shed. During the ’seventies of the last century the people of 
Serbia and Bulgaria and Montenegro and Roumania were once 
more trying to gain their freedom and the Turks, with the 
support of many of the western powers, were trying to prevent 
this. 

After a period of particularly atrocious massacres in Bul¬ 
garia in the year 1876, the Russian people lost all patience. 
The government was forced to intervene just as President Mc¬ 
Kinley was obliged to go to Cuba and stop the shooting-squads 
of General Weyler in Havana. In April of the year 1877 the 
Russian armies crossed the Danube, stormed the Shipka pass, 
and after the capture of Plevna marched southward until they 
reached the gates of Constantinople. Turkey appealed for 
help to England. There were many English people who de¬ 
nounced their government when it took the side of the sultan. 
But Disraeli (who had just made Queen Victoria Empress of 
India and who loved the picturesque Turks while he hated the 
Russians, who were brutally cruel to the Jewish people within 
their frontiers) decided to interfere. Russia was forced to 
conclude the peace of San Stefano (1878), and the question of 
the Balkans was left to a congress which convened at Berlin 
in June and July of the same year. 

This famous conference was entirely dominated by the per¬ 
sonality of Disraeli. Even Bismarck feared the clever old 
man with his well-oiled curly hair and his supreme arrogance, 
tempered by a cynical sense of humor and a marvelous gift 
for flattery. At Berlin the British prime minister carefully 
watched over the fate of his friends the Turks. Montenegro, 
Serbia, and Roumania were recognized as independent king- 


436 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


doms. The principality of Bulgaria was given a semi-inde¬ 
pendent status under Prince Alexander of Battenberg, a 
nephew of Tsar Alexander II. But none of those countries 
was given the chance to develop its powers and its resources 
as it would have been able to do had England been less anxious 
about the fate of the sultan, whose domains were necessary to 
the safety of the British Empire as a bulwark against further 
Russian aggression. 

To make matters worse, the congress allowed Austria to 
take Bosnia and Herzegovina away from the Turks to be 
“administered” as part of the Habsburg domains. It is true 
that Austria made an excellent job of it. The neglected prov¬ 
inces were as well managed as the best of the British colonies, 
and that is saying a great deal. But they were inhabited by 
many Serbians. In older days they had been part of the great 
Serbian empire which early in the fourteenth century had de¬ 
fended western Europe against the invasions of the Turks and 
whose capital had been a center of civilization one hundred 
and fifty years before Columbus discovered the new lands of 
the west. The Serbians remembered their ancient glory—as 
who would not? They resented the presence of the Austrians 
in two provinces, which, so they felt, were theirs by every right 
of tradition. 

And it was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, that the 
Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was mur¬ 
dered on June 28 of the year 1914. The assassin was a Serbian 
student who had acted from purely patriotic motives. 

But the blame for this terrible catastrophe, which was the 
immediate though not the only cause of the great World War, 
did not lie with the half-crazy Serbian boy or his Austrian 
victim. It must be traced back to the days of the famous 
Berlin Conference when Europe was too busy building a ma¬ 
terial civilization to care about the aspirations and the dreams 
of a forgotten race in a dreary corner of the old Balkan 
Peninsula. 



A NEW WORLD 


“Nature has set no limits to our hopes,” wrote an eminent 
French writer during one French Revolution, “and the picture 
of the human race, now freed from its chains and marching 
with a firm tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness, 
offers to the philosopher a spectacle which consoles him for the 
errors, the crimes, and the injustices which still pollute and 
afflict this earth.” 



WAR 

The world has just passed through an agony of pain com¬ 
pared to which the French Revolution was a mere incident. 
The shock has been so great that it has killed the last spark of 
hope in the breasts of millions of men. They were chanting a 
hvmn of progress, and four years of slaughter followed their 
prayers for peace. “Is it worth while,” so they ask, “to work 
and slave for the benefit of creatures who have not yet passed 
beyond the stage of the earliest cave men?” 

There is but one answer. 


437 











438 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


That answer is “Yes!” 

The World War was a terrible calamity. But it did not 
mean the end of things. On the contrary it brought about the 
coming of a new day. 

It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the 
middle ages. The actors who played their parts upon that 
long-forgotten stage are all dead. We can criticize them with 
a cool head. The audience that applauded their efforts has dis¬ 
persed. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt their feelings. 

But it is very difficult to give a true account of contempo¬ 
rary events. The problems that fill the minds of the people 
with whom we pass through life are our own problems, and 
they hurt us too much or they please us too well to be de¬ 
scribed with that fairness which is necessary when we are writ¬ 
ing history and not blowing the trumpet of propaganda. 

Often before have ‘I warned you against the false impres¬ 
sion that is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs 
which divide the story of man into four parts, the ancient world, 
the middle ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and 
modern times. The last of these terms is the most dangerous. 
The word “modern” implies that we, the people of the twentieth 
century, are at the top of human achievement. Fifty years ago 
the liberals of England who followed the leadership of Glad¬ 
stone felt that the problem of a truly representative and demo¬ 
cratic form of government had been solved forever by the 
second great Reform Bill, which gave workmen an equal share 
in tho government with their employers. When Disraeli and 
his conservative friends talked of a dangerous “leap in the 
dark,” they answered “No.” They felt certain of their cause 
and trusted that henceforth all classes of society would co¬ 
operate to make the government of their common country a 
success. Since then many things have happened, and the few 
liberals who are still alive begin to understand that they were 
mistaken. 

There is no definite answer to any historical problem. 

Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish 
as those sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have perished. 


A NEW WORLD 


439 


If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new 
and much broader view of life. Then, go one step farther 
and try to imagine yourself in the position of your own de¬ 
scendants who will take your place in the year 10,000. They 
too will learn history. But what will they think of those short 
six thousand years during which we have kept a written record 
of our actions and of our thoughts? They will think of Napo¬ 
leon as a contemporary of Tiglath Pileser, the Assyrian con¬ 
queror. Perhaps they will confuse him with Jenghiz Khan or 
Alexander the Macedonian. The Great War which has just 
come to an end will appear in the light of that long commer¬ 
cial conflict which settled the supremacy of the Mediterranean 
when Rome and Carthage fought during one hundred and 
twenty-eight years for the mastery of the sea. The Balkan 
troubles of the 19th century (the struggle for freedom of Ser¬ 
bia and Greece and Bulgaria and Montenegro) to them will 

seem a continuation of the disordered conditions caused bv the 

%/ 

Great Migrations. They will look at pictures of the Rheims 
cathedral which only yesterday was destroyed by German guns 
as we look upon a photograph of the Acropolis ruined two 
hundred and fifty years ago during a war between the Turks 
and the Venetians. They will regard the fear of death, which 
is still common among many people, as a childish superstition 
which was perhaps natural in a race of men who had burned 
witches as late as the year 1692. Even our hospitals and our 
laboratories and our operating rooms of which we are so proud 
will look like slightly improved workshops of alchemists and 
medieval surgeons. 

And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and 
women are not “modern” at all. On the contrary we still 
belong to the last generations of the cave-dwellers. The foun¬ 
dation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human race 
was given its first chance to become truly civilized when it took 
courage to question all things and made “knowledge and un¬ 
derstanding” the foundation upon which to create a more 
reasonable and sensible society of human beings. The Great 
War was the birth of this new world. 


440 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


For a long time to come people will write mighty books to 
prove that this or that or the other person brought about the 
war. The Socialists will publish volumes in which they will ac¬ 
cuse the “capitalists” of having brought about the war for 
“commercial gain.” The capitalists will answer that they lost 
infinitely more through the war than they made—that their 



THE SPREAD OF THE IMPERIAL IDEA 

























A NEW WORLD 


441 


children were among the first to go and fight and be killed— 
and they will show how in every country the bankers tried their 
very best to avert the outbreak of hostilities. French historians 
will go through the register of German sins from the days of 
Charlemagne until the days of William of Hohenzollern and 
German historians will return the compliment and will go 
through the list of French horrors from the days of Charle¬ 
magne until the days of President Poincare. And then they 
will establish to their own satisfaction that the other fellow 
was guilty of “causing the war.” Statesmen, dead and not 
yet dead, in all countries will take to their typewriters and 
explain how they tried to avert hostilities and how their wicked 
opponents forced them into it. 

The historian, a hundred years hence, will not bother about 
these apologies and vindications. He will understand the real 
nature of the underlying causes and he will know that personal 
ambitions arid personal wickedness and personal greed had very 
little to do with the final outburst. The original mistake which 
was responsible for all this misery was committed when our 
scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and 
chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is 
slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known 
sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years 
behind the small group of courageous leaders. 

A Zulu in a frock coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride 
a bicycle and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being 
with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 
Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth 
century tradesman. 

If vou do not understand this at first, read it again. It 

i/ 

will become clearer to you in a moment and it will explain 
many things that have happened these last six years. 

Perhaps I may give you another, more familiar, example, 
to show you what I mean. In the movie theaters, jokes and 
funny remarks are often thrown upon the screen. Watch the 
audience the next time you have a chance. A few people seem 
almost to inhale the words. It takes them but a second to read 



442 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take from 
twenty to thirty seconds. Finally those men and women who 
do not read any more than they can help, get the point when 
the brighter ones among the audience have already begun to 
decipher the next cut-in. It is not different in human life, 
as I shall now show you. 

In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the 
Roman Empire continued to live for a thousand years after 
the death of the last Roman emperor. It caused the establish¬ 
ment of a large number of imitation empires. It gave the 
Bishops of Rome a chance to make themselves the head of the 
entire Church, because they represented the idea of Roman 
world-supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly harmless 
barbarian chieftains into a career of crime and endless war¬ 
fare, because they were forever under the spell of this magic 
word “Rome.” All these people, popes, emperors, and plain 
fighting men, were not very different from you or me. But 
they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was a vital 
issue—something living—something which was remembered 
clearly by the father and the son and the grandson. And so 
they struggled and sacrificed themselves for a cause which 
to-day would not find a dozen recruits. 

In still another chapter I have told you how the great reli¬ 
gious wars took place more than a century after the first open 
act of the Reformation, and if you will compare the chapter 
on the Thirty Years War with that on Inventions, you will see 
that this ghastly butchery took place at a time when the first 
clumsy steam engines were already puffing in the laboratories 
of a number of French and German and English scientists. 
But the world at large took no interest in these strange con¬ 
traptions, and went on with a grand theological discussion 
which to-day causes yawns, but no anger. 

And so it goes. A thousand years from now, the historian 
will use the same words about Europe of the outgoing nine¬ 
teenth century, and he will see how men were engaged upon 
terrific nationalistic struggles while the laboratories all around 
them were filled with serious folk who cared not one whit for 



A NEW WORLD 


443 


politics as long as they could force nature to surrender a few 
more of her million secrets. 

You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving 
at. The engineer and the scientist and the chemist, within a 
single generation, filled Europe and America and Asia with 
their vast machines, with their telegraphs, their flying machines, 
their coal-tar products. They created a new world in which 
time and space were reduced to insignificance. They invented 
new products, and they made these so cheap that almost every¬ 
one could buy them. I have told you all this before, but it 
certainly will bear repeating. 

To keep the ever-increasing number of factories going, the 
owners, who had also become the rulers of the land, needed raw 
materials and coal. Especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of 
the people were still thinking in terms of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries and clinging to the old notions of the 
state as a dynastic or political organization. This clumsy me¬ 
dieval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle the 
highly modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. 
It did its best, according to the rules of the game which had 
been laid down centuries before. The different states created 
enormous armies and gigantic navies which were used for the 
purpose of acquiring new possessions in distant lands. Wher¬ 
ever there was a tiny bit of land left, there arose an English or 
a French or a German or a Russian colony. If the natives 
objected, they were killed. In most cases they did not object, 
and were allowed to live peacefully, provided they did not 
interfere with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil 
mines or the gold mines or the rubber plantations, and they 
derived many benefits from the foreign occupation. 

Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw 
materials wanted the same piece of land at the same time. 
Then there was a war. This occurred fifteen years ago when 
Russia and Japan fought for the possession of certain terri¬ 
tories which belonged to the Chinese people. Such conflicts, 
however, were the exception. No one really desired to fight. 
Indeed, the idea of fighting with armies and battleships and 


444 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


submarines began to seem absurd to the men of the early 20th 
century. They associated the idea of violence with the long- 
ago age of unlimited monarchies and intriguing dynasties. 
Every day they read in their papers of still further inventions, 
of groups of English and American and German scientists who 
were working together in perfect friendship for the purpose 
of an advance in medicine or in astronomy. They lived in a 
busy world of trade and of commerce and factories. But only 
a few noticed that the development of the state—of the gigantic 
community of people who recognize certain common ideals— 
was lagging several hundred years behind. They tried to warn 
the others. But the others were occupied with their own 
affairs. 

I have used so many similes that I must apologize for bring¬ 
ing in one more. The Ship of State (that old and trusted ex¬ 
pression which is ever new and always picturesque) of the 
Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and the Venetians 
and the merchant adventurers of the seventeenth century had 
been a sturdy craft, constructed of well-seasoned wood and 
commanded by officers who knew both their crew and their 
vessel and who understood the limitations of the art of navi¬ 
gating which had been handed down to them by their ancestors. 
Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery. 
First one part, then another of the old ship of state was 
changed. Her dimensions were increased. The sails were dis¬ 
carded for steam. Better living quarters were established, but 
more people were forced to go down into the stokehole, and 
while the work was safe and fairly remunerative, they did not 
like it as well as their old and more dangerous job in the rig¬ 
ging. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, the old wooden 
square-rigger had been transformed into a modern ocean liner. 
But the captain and the mates remained the same. They were 
appointed or elected in the same way as a hundred years be- 
fore. They were taught the same system of navigation which 

had served the mariners of the fifteenth century. In their 

%> 

cabins hung the same charts and signal flags which had done 
service in the days of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. 


A NEW WORLD 


445 


In short, they were (through no fault of their own) completely 
incompetent. 

The sea of international politics is not very broad. When 
those imperial and colonial liners began to try and outrun each 
other, accidents were bound to happen. They did happen. 
You can still see the wreckage if you venture to pass through 
that part of the ocean. 

And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is 
in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership— 
who will have the courage of their own visions and who will 
recognize clearly that we are only at the beginning of the 
voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of seaman¬ 
ship. 

They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices. 
They will have to fight their way to the top against every pos¬ 
sible form of opposition. When they reach the bridge, mutiny 
of an envious crew may cause their death. But some day, a 
man will arise who will bring the vessel safely to port, and he 
will be the hero of the ages 









AN HISTORICAL READING LIST FOR CHILDREN 
Prepared by Leonore St. John Power 

The Days Before History 

“How the Present Came From the Past/’ by Margaret E. Wells, Volume I. 

How earliest man learned to make tools and build homes, and the stories 
he told about the fire-makers, the sun, and the frost. A simple, illustrated 
account of these things for children. 

“The Story of Ab,” by Stanley Waterloo. 

A romantic tale of the time of the cave man. (A much simplified edition 
of this for little children is “Ab, the Cave Man,” adapted by William Lewis 
Nida.) 

“Industrial and Social History Series,” by Katharine E. Dopp. 

“The Tree Dwellers—The Age of Fear” 

“The Early Cave-Men—The Age of Combat” 

“The Later Cave-Men—The Age of the Chase” 

“The Early Sea People—First Steps in the Conquest of the Waters” 
“The Tent-Dwellers—The Early Fishing Men” 

Very simple stories of the way in which man learned how to make pot¬ 
tery, how to weave and spin, and how to conquer land and sea. 

“Ancient Man,” written and drawn and done into color by Hendrik Willem 
Van Loon. 


447 
















448 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


The beginning of civilization pictured and described in a new and fasci¬ 
nating fashion, with story maps showing exactly what happened in all parts 

of the world. A book for children of all ages. 

The Dawn of History 

“The Civilization of the Ancient Egyptians,’’ by A. Bothwell Gosse. 

“No country possesses so many wonders, and has such a number of works 
which defy description.’’ An excellent, profusely illustrated account of the 
domestic life, amusements, art, religion, and occupations of these wonderful 
people. 

“How the Present Came From the Past,’’ by Margaret E. Wells, Volume II. 

What the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Persians 
contributed to civilization. This is brief and simple and may be used as a 
first book on the subject. 

“Stories of Egyptian Gods and Heroes,” by F. FI. Brooksbank. 

The beliefs of the Egyptians, the legend of Isis and Osiris, the builders 
of the Pyramids and the Temples, the Riddle of the Sphinx, all add to the 
fascination of this romantic picture of Egypt. 

“Wonder Tales of the Ancient World,” by Rev. James Baikie. 

Tales of the Wizards, tales of Travel and Adventure, and legends of 
the Gods all gathered from ancient Egyptian literature. 

“Ancient Assyria,” by Rev. James Baikie. 

Which tells of a city 2800 years ago with a street lined with beautiful 
enameled reliefs and with libraries of clay. 

“The Bible for Young People,” arranged from the King James version, with 
twenty-four full page illustrations from old masters. 

“Old, Old Tales From the Old, Old Book,” by Nora Archibald Smith. 

“Written in the East these characters live forever in the West—they 
pervade the world.” A good rendering of the Old Testament. 

“The Jewish Fairy Book,” translated and adapted by Gerald Friedlander. 

Stories of great nobility and beauty from the Talmud and the old Jewish 
cha23-books. 

“Eastern Stories and Legends,” by Marie L. Shedlock. 

4 he soldiers of Alexander who had settled in the East, wandering 
merchants of many nations and climes, crusading knights and hermits 
brought these Buddha Stories from the East to the West.” 

Stories of Greece and Rome 
‘ The Story of the Golden Age,” by James Baldwin. 

Some of the most beautiful of the old Greek myths woven into the story 


449 


AN HISTORICAL READING LIST 

of the Odyssey make this book a good introduction to the glories of the 
Golden Age. 

“A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with 
pictures by Maxfield Parrish. 

“The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy,” by Padraic Colum, 
illustrated by Willy Pogany. 

An attractive, poetically rendered account of “the world’s greatest story.” 

“The Story of Rome,” by Mary Macgregor, with twenty plates in color. 

Attractively illustrated and simply presented story of Rome from the 
earliest times to the death of Augustus. 

“Plutarch’s Lives for Boys and Girls,” retold by W. H. Weston. 

“The Lays of Ancient Rome,” by Lord Macaulay. 

“The early history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything 
else in Latin Literature.” 

“Children of the Dawn,” by Elsie Finnemore Buckley. 

Old Greek tales of love, adventure, heroism, skill, achievement, or defeat 
exceptionally well told. Especially recommended for girls. 

“The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children,” by Charles Kingsley. 

“The Story of Greece,” by Mary Macgregor, with nineteen plates in color 
by Walter Crane. 

Attractively illustrated and simply presented—a good book to begin on. 

Christianity 

“The Story of Jesus,” pictures from paintings by Giotto, Fra Angelico, 
Duccio, Ghirlandais, and Barnja-da-Siena. Descriptive text from the 
New Testament, selected and arranged by Ethel Natalie Dana. 

A beautiful book and a beautiful way to present the Christ Story. 

“A Child’s Book of Saints,” by William Canton. 

Sympathetically told and charmingly written stories of men and women 
whose faith brought about strange miracles, and whose goodness to man 
and beast set the world wondering. 

“The Seven Champions of Christendom,” edited by F. J. H. Darton. 

How the knights of old—St. George of England, St. Denis of France, 
St. James of Spain, and others—fought with enchanters and evil spirits to 
preserve the Kingdom of God. Fine old romances interestingly told for 
children. 

“Stories From the Christian East,” by Stephen Gaselee. 

Unusual stories which have been translated from the Coptic, the Greek, 
the Latin, and the Ethiopic. 


450 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


“Jerusalem and the Crusades,” by Estelle Blyth, with eight plates in color. 

Historical stories telling how children and priests, hermits, and knights 
all strove to keep the Cross in the East. 

Stories of Legend and Chivalry 

“Stories of Norse Heroes From the Eddas and Sagas,” retold by E. M. 
Wilmot-Buxton. 

These are tales which the Northmen tell concerning the wisdom of 
All-Father Odin, and how all things began and how they ended. A good 
book for all children, and for story-tellers. 

“The Story of Siegfried,” by James Baldwin. 

A good introduction to this Northern hero whose strange and daring 
deeds fill the pages of the old sagas. 

“The Story of King Arthur and His Knights,” written and illustrated by 
Howard Pyle. 

This, and the companion volumes, “The Story of the Champions of the 
Round Table,” “The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions,” “The 
Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur,” form an incomparable col¬ 
lection for children. 

“The Boy’s King Arthur,” edited by Sidney Lanier, illustrated by N. C. 
Wyeth. 

A very good rendering of Malory’s King Arthur, made especially attrac¬ 
tive by the colored illustrations. 

“Irish Fairy Tales,” by James Stephens, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. 

Beautifully pictured and poetically told legends of Ireland’s epic hero 
Fionn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, and a book 
for story-telling or reading aloud. 

“Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France,” by A. J. Church. 

Stories from the old French and English chronicles showing the romantic 
glamour surrounding the great Charlemagne and his crusading knights. 

“The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood,” written and illustrated by Howard 
Pyle. 

Both in picture and in story this book holds first place in the hearts of 
children. 

“A Book of Ballad Stories,” by Mary Macleod. 

Good prose versions of some of the famous old ballads sung by the min¬ 
strels of England and Scotland. 

“The Story of Roland,” by James Baldwin. 

“There is, in short, no country in Europe, and no language, in which 
the exploits of Charlemagne and Roland have not at some time been 


AN HISTORICAL READING LIST 


451 


recounted and sung.” This book will serve as a good introduction to a fine 
heroic character. 

“The Boy’s Froissart,” being Sir John Froissart’s Chronicles of Adven¬ 
ture, Battle, and Custom in England, France, Spain. 

“Froissart sets the boy’s mind upon manhood and the man’s mind upon 
boyhood.” An invaluable background for the future study of history. 

“The Boy’s Percy,” being old ballads of War, Adventure, and Love from 
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, edited by Sidney Lanier. 
“He who walks in the way these following ballads point, will be manful 
in necessary fight, loyal in love, generous to the poor, tender in the house¬ 
hold, prudent in living, merry upon occasion, and honest in all things.” 

“Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims,” retold from Chaucer and others by 
E. J. H. Darton. 

“Sometimes a pilgrimage seemed nothing but an excuse for a lively and 
pleasant holiday, and the travelers often made themselves very merry on 
the road, with their jests and songs, and their flutes and fiddles and bag¬ 
pipes.” A good prose version much enjoyed by boys and girls. 

“Joan of Arc,” written and illustrated by M. Boutet de Monvel. 

A very fine interpretation of the life of this great heroine. A book to be 
owned by every boy and girl. 

“When Knights Were Bold,” by Eva March Tappan. 

Telling of the training of a knight, of the daily life in a castle, of pil¬ 
grimages and crusades, of merchant guilds, of schools and literature, in 
short, a full picture of life in the days of chivalry. A good book to supple¬ 
ment the romantic stories of the time. 

Adventures in New Worlds 

“A Book of Discovery,” by M. B. Synge, fully illustrated from authentic 
sources and with maps. 

A thoroughly fascinating book about the world’s exploration from the 
earliest times to the discovery of the South Pole. A book to be owned by 
older boys and girls who like true tales of adventure. 

“A Short History of Discovery From the Earliest Times to the Founding 
of the Colonies on the American Continent,” written and done in 
color by Hendrik Van Loon. 

“Dear Children: History is the most fascinating and entertaining and 
instructive of arts.” A book to delight children of all ages. 

“The Story of Marco Polo,” by Noah Brooks. 

“Olaf the Glorious,” by Robert Leighton. 


452 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


An historical story of the Viking age. 

“The Conquerors of Mexico/’ retold from Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico/’ 
by Henry Gilbert. 

“The Conquerors of Peru/’ retold from Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru,” by 
Henry Gilbert. 

“Vikings of the Pacific,” by A. C. Laut. 

Adventures of Bering the Dane; the outlaw hunters of Russia; Benyow- 
sky, the Polish pirate; Cook and Vancouver; Drake, and other soldiers of 
fortune on the West Coast of America. 

“The Argonauts of Faith,” by Basil Mathews. 

The Adventures of the Mayflower Pilgrims. 

“Pathfinders of the West,” by A. C. Laut. 

The thrilling story of the adventures of the men who discovered the 
great Northwest. 

“Beyond the Old Frontier,” by George Bird Grinnell. 

Adventures of Indian Fighters, Hunters, and Fur-Traders on the Pacific 
Coast. 

“A History of Travel in America,” by Seymour Dunbar, illustrated from old 
woodcuts and engravings. 4 volumes. 

An interesting book for children who wish to understand the problems 
and difficulties their grandfathers had in the conquest of the West. This 
is a standard book upon the subject of early travel, but is so readable as to be 
of interest to older children. 

“The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators,” by Hendrik Van Loon. Fully 
illustrated from old prints. 

The World's Progress in Invention — Art—Music 

“Gabriel and the Hour Book,” bv Evaleen Stein. 

How a boy learned from the monks how to grind and mix the colors for 
illuminating the beautiful hand-printed books of the time, and how he 
himself made books that are now treasured in the museums of France and 
England. 

“Historic Inventions,” by Rupert S. Holland. 

Stories of the invention of printing, the steam engine, the spinning- 
jenny, the safety-lamp, the sewing machine, electric light, and other wonders 
of mechanism. 

“A History of Everyday Things in England,” written and illustrated by 
Marjorie and C. V. B. Quennell. 2 Volumes. 

A most fascinating book, profusely illustrated in black and white and 


AN HISTORICAL READING LIST 


453 


in color, giving a vivid picture of life in England from 1066-1799. It 
tells of wars and of home life, of amusements and occupations, of art and 
literature, of science and invention. A book to be owned by every boy and 
girl. 

“First Steps in the Enjoyment of Pictures,” by Maude I. G. Oliver. 

A book designed to help children in their appreciation of art by giving 
them technical knowledge of the media, the draughtsmanship, the composi¬ 
tion, and the technique of well-known American pictures. 

“Knights of Art,” by Amy Steedman. 

Stories of Italian Painters. Attractively illustrated in color from old 
masters. 

“Masters of Music,” by Anna Alice Chapin. 

“Story Lives of Men of Science,” by F. J. Rowbotham. 

“All About Treasures of the Earth,” by Frederick A. Talbot. 

A book that tells many interesting things about coal, salt, iron, rare 
metals, and precious stones. 

“The Boys’ Book of New Inventions,” by Harry E. Maule. 

An account of the machines and mechanical processes that are making 
the history of our time more dramatic than that of any other age since the 
world began. 

“Masters of Space,” by Walter Kellogg Towers. 

Stories of the wonders of telegraphing through the air and beneath the 
sea with signals, and of speaking across continents. 

“All About Railways,” by F. S. Hartnell. 

“The Man-of-War, What She Has Done and What She Is Doing,” by 
Commander E. Hamilton Currey. 

True stories about galleys and pirate ships, about the Spanish Main 
and famous frigates, and about slave-hunting expeditions in the days of old. 

The Democracy of To-Day 

“The Land of Fair Play,” by Geoffrey Parsons. 

“This book aims to make clear the great, unseen services that America 
renders each of us, and the active devotion each of us must yield in return 
for America to endure.” An excellent book on our government for boys 
and girls. 

“The American Idea as Expounded by American Statesmen,” compiled by 
Joseph B. Gilder. 

A good collection, including the Declaration of Independence, the 


454 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


Constitution of the United States, the Monroe Doctrine, and the famous 
speeches of Washington, Lincoln, Webster, and Roosevelt. 

“The Making of an American,” by Jacob A. Riis. 

The true story of a Danish boy who became one of America’s finest 
citizens. 

“The Promised Land,” by Mary Antin. 

A true story about a little immigrant. “Before we came, the New 
World knew not the Old; but since we have begun to come, the Young 
World has taken the Old by the hand, and the two are learning to march 
side by side, seeking a common destiny.” 


QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 


TO THE TEACHER 

When 1 was a small boy and was taught my first history, I was sup¬ 
posed to see everything with my ears. 

I did not find it easy and I began to draw pictures. But I was not 
supposed to draw pictures. I was supposed to sit still and to learn things 
by heart. Pictures were considered a “waste of time,” and my juvenile 
artistic ambitions were not encouraged. 

I mention this personal fact because it has to do with the system which 
I tried to follow in this book. 

That pictures belong to a history-book was recognized several years ago. 
Practically all the better American textbooks (and there are many) are now 
illustrated. 

But I am still looking for something along different lines. Let me try 
and explain what I mean. 

There may be children who do not like to draw, but they are very rare. 
It is true that most boys and girls soon become self-conscious and drop the 
habit of scribbling and begin to copy Harrison Fisher sofa-pillows. But 
if you try to get hold of them before they have reached that stage, you may 
be able to do something with them if you follow the suggestions of the next 
few pages. 

When I wrote the “Story of Mankind,” I had a definite goal in view. I 
wanted to write one short book that should show the absolute “unity” of 
all history. Next, I wanted to give children and grown-ups a taste for 
history. Finally, I tried to visualize history. 

We live in a time of “movies.” Every child is familiar with “living 
pictures.” Why not allow him to revaluate his own historical ideas into such 
images as please him best? 

Let us understand each other. I do not want to make history a pleasant 
afternoon’s entertainment. History cannot be taught without a skeleton of 
dates and fixed facts, and these have to be learned. But it is possible to 
associate such dates with certain home-made pothooks which will stick in 
the memory of the average boy and girl for an astonishingly long period. 

When I explain this to teachers, they often answer, “Yes, but we cannot 
all be artists, and many of us do not know how to draw.” 


455 


456 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


That, however, is not necessary. Let the children make the drawings 
after their own fashion. A pencil and a fountain pen are now the common 
possession of almost everyone. Paper is not expensive, and a ten-cent box 
of crayons will last for almost half a year. 

Do not try to obtain the necessary results entirely by the picture-problems 
which I shall suggest. Use the old system, too, or such parts of it as you 
think best for your particular class of boys and girls. Once in a while, 
however, you will find it useful to insist upon a few animated maps and 
some imaginary scenery. If your experience coincides with mine, you will 
be agreeably surprised. 

Children too often share the opinion of their parents that history is 
not a very profitable investment of either time or energy. Once that preju¬ 
dice has been overcome, you will be able to give your boys and girls a 
splendid hobby for the rest of their lives. And you will conquer it the 
moment you allow your pupils to “write and illustrate their own history.” 

Give them a scrapbook. Let them put down their own version of those 
events which you have mentioned, and then let them add their own illustra¬ 
tions. The latter will often be fearful and wonderful. But thev will mean 

•> 

something to the boy or girl who made them. 

After a while, this system will turn the whole class into a cheerful 
historical laboratory and it will create that healthy enthusiasm without which 
no subject can ever be fairly taught. 

THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 

1. Take a walk in the outskirts of your city or village. 
Try to discover what sort of a landscape you happen to live 
in. Write a short paper upon this subject and draw the 
countryside, with which you have become familiar, as you 
imagine it to have looked a hundred thousand years ago. 

2. Write a short paper upon the difference in size of the 
bodies and brains of a number of animals with which you are 
thoroughly familiar, such as cats and dogs and pigs and cows. 

3. Tell us what you have observed of the intelligence of 
the animals with which you are familiar. Cats and dogs and 
horses often seem to reason. How far does this reasoning go 
and where does it stop short of human reasoning? Have you 
ever had a dog or a cat who did things which were almost 
human in the application of reason to a complicated problem 
such as getting food out of a cupboard or remembering the 
shortest road to a given object? 


OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS 


457 


4. Tell your own story of the beginning of things, and if 
you have been taught the Biblical story of creation, tell that 
in your own words. 

5. How about some pictures, showing the world during 
the age of the great reptiles and even before that, when there 
were only plants? 

6. Take a walk throught the country with your eyes wide 
open and then enumerate the many things which do not seem to 
have changed since the beginning of time. 

OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS AND 
PREHISTORIC MAN 

1. Make a picture showing a family of the earliest crea¬ 
tures who walked on their hind legs and lived among the trees 
of the forests and in the plains. Do you think that they lived 
very differently from many of the better-class animals who are 
our daily companions? For example, are not many animals 
more cleanly in their habits of eating and drinking and home¬ 
making than the earliest men? 

2. Study the life of the cave man. Make a picture of his 
cave. How do you think that he arranged his “home”? 

3. If you happen to live near a cave, describe how you 
would arrange things if suddenly all cities burned down and 
you had to go hack to the cave to he protected against wind 
and rain. 

4. Get some clay or putty and make the simplest bowls 
and cups and whatever else a cave family needed to prepare 
its daily food. 

5. Did you ever hear of Eskimos? Do you think they are 
really the survivors of a race who lived during the stone age 
amidst the glaciers of Europe? Tell about their lives. Try 
to make a snow house and see what the world looks like from 
the inside. 

6. If there is a museum of such things near by, look at 
the stone axes and the stone arrowheads of our own Indians. 
Compare them with our modern weapons and tools. 


458 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


7. How would you have spent the day if you had been a 
cave man? 

8. How would you have spent the day if you had been a 
cave woman? 

9. Do you think it would have been any fun to be a child 
living in a cave? Would you have been allowed to play or 
would you have been made to work as soon as you could handle 
a stone knife? 

10. Did you ever try to discover how we happen to wear 
just the sort of clothes we do wear nowadays? Can you imag¬ 
ine the original use of our modern collar? How did our shoes 
become just the sort of shoes we wear? Are we always going 
to wear the clothes of to-day? 

11. Women still wear the skins of dead animals. Which 
animals are they ? 

12. Couldn’t you help one another to write a cave-man 
play? 

HIEROGLYPHICS 


1. Sit down and think very hard and then discover a sign- 
language of your own. Write one another letters in it. 

2. You have all read how the Indians used to talk to each 
other with signs. Try to tell one another something with the 
help of signs. Pretend that you do not know a word of Rus¬ 
sian and have come into a Russian town and want something 
to eat and to drink and to find out where the station is and 
when the next train goes. 

3. You have read that little sentence of “I believe I saw 
a giraffe.” I have tried terribly hard to discover more sen¬ 
tences like that which would be hieroglyphically correct. I 
have not been able to find any, but there must be others. Can 
you help me to do something with words like “beware” or 
“behoove” or “island”? 


THE NILE VALLEY 

1. If you were stranded alone on an uninhabited island, 
what would you do first? 


THE STORY OF EGYPT 


459 


2. What is the book, which every hoy and girl has read, 
which tells the story of a man who was shipwrecked and who 
all alone “created civilization anew”? 

3. What would you yourself do the moment you were 
'certain of enough things to eat and drink? Would you go 

fishing for the fun of it? Or hunting? Even when it was cold 
and raining? 

4. Would you invent things, or would you rather make 
pictures ? And if you had no paper or pencil, how would you 
make these pictures? 

5. Were the Egyptians the only people who ever believed 
that man has an immortal soul? 

6. What did our own Indians do with their dead? Have 
you ever read of strange customs among native people who 
bury their dead in trees or in caves? Are we very different 
from the Egyptians in the way in which we treat our dead? 
In what particular way are we different? 

7. How would you build a pyramid with modern 
machinery ? 


THE STORY OF EGYPT 


1. Where are the centers of our modern civilization? Are 
our big cities situated in the heart of the plains or are they near 
the mouths of rivers? 

2. If Egypt were a modern state, where do you think that 
the capital would be? 

3. Draw a cross-section picture of the succeeding forms 
of government of Egypt. Use the cross-section picture of the 
mound of Troy on page 44 as your example. 

4. Get an atlas and make an animated map of Egypt and 
put in whatever you think necessary. The picture of prehis¬ 
toric Europe on page 14 will show you what I mean. 

5. Would you have been happy in Egypt? In what way 
do you think the civilization of the Egyptians better than ours? 
And why would you have been rather uncomfortable as an 
Egyptian peasant or even as an Egyptian king? 


460 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


MESOPOTAMIA 

1. Give an example in our own country of several river 
valleys which have attracted large numbers of people. 

2. Would you rather live in the plains or on the banks of 
a river or near the seashore? 

3. Was the Melting Pot of old Mesopotamia in any way 
like the modern Melting Pot of America? What are some of 
the troubles connected with creating a new civilization? For 
example, what happens when you put Irishmen and Russians 
and Italians and Jews and Japanese together and ask them to 
order a dinner? What becomes of the original stock of a 
country (like our Indians) when millions of new people settle 
in the country? 


THE SUMERIANS 

1. If you can get hold of some clay, try to make a few of 
our own letters with the help of a nail. What letters would 
have to be changed if you tried to write rapidly? 

2. What were the disadvantages of nail-writing? 

3. Draw a picture of Babylon as you imagine it to have 
been. 

4. When you realize what great mathematical and scien¬ 
tific and astronomical discoveries the Babylonians and Chal¬ 
deans made with the help of very crude instruments, and when 
you remember that our own scientific progress is so very slow, 
do you think that we are so much cleverer than those ancient 
people whose cities have disappeared from the face of the 
earth ? 

5 . Can you imagine your own town or a big city like New 
York as it will he three thousand years from now, if for some 
reason civilization moves farther westward, as it very well may ? 

6. Suppose that you had told a professor of history in one 
of the schools maintained by Hammurabi that Babylon would 
soon cease to be the center of the civilized world and would 
become a forgotten rubbish-heap, what would he have an¬ 
swered ? 


MOSES 


461 


7. Are we quite certain that the fate of Babylonia and 
Assyria does not await us, and what must we do to escape 
such a future? 


MOSES 

1. Make a map of the wanderings of the Jews. 

2. In what way did Abraham resemble some of our own 
famous pioneers? 

3. Write down, in your own words, the great moral law 
of Moses. 

4. Compare the contributions made to our own civiliza¬ 
tion by the Egyptians, by the Babylonians, and by the Jews. 

THE PHOENICIANS 

1. Make a map of Europe showing the colonial posses¬ 
sions of the Phoenicians. Where can you find such a map? 
In any historical atlas. Please remember that you will have 
to use the regular historical atlas and quite a large number of 
other books in connection with The Story of Mankind. You 
can make your maps as much “alive” as you like, hut you will 
have to get the main geographical facts from an ordinary atlas. 

2. Tell the story of our alphabet. Why is the Russian 
alphabet different from ours? 

THE INDO-EUROPEANS 

1. What are the most important races of the world to-day, 
and where do they live? 

2. Did you ever hear of races which have completely died 
out? If so, what races are they? You ought to know, for some 
that are dying out right now are living not a million miles away. 

3. Is there any danger of our own race dying out? Re¬ 
member what I asked you about the ruins of Babylon. 

THE AEGEAN SEA 

1. Tell the story of the Island Bridge of the iEgean Sea. 

2. H ave there been other civilizations which traveled by 


462 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


way of a lot of little islands? How are you to find out? Once 
more I ask you to look at your atlas. See whether you can find 

%/ V 

any such regular rows of little islands in other parts of the 
world. Then discover for yourself whether they served as an 
actual “bridge” for a civilization crossing from one continent 
to another or whether they just happen to be of some slight 
geographical importance without any further historical mean¬ 
ing. 


Questions like these are much harder than those usually 
found in textbooks. They will make you use your own power 
of reasoning, and that is not a bad thing. You will need it 
later in life. 

3. Make a picture of a Cretan “colony.” 

4. Compare such an old Cretan colony with the first settle¬ 
ments of the white men on the coast of North America. 

5 . What did the Cretans do for us? 


THE GREEKS 

1. Describe the coming of the Greeks and make an ani¬ 
mated map of the conquest of the xEgean world by the Greeks. 

2. Read all the books you can get which tell the story of 
the Trojan War. 

3. What was the Trojan War? A quarrel over the stolen 
wife of a Greek prince, or a quarrel between two different races, 
or a fight for the possession of a commercial route? 

4. If we could read the Trojan side of the famous siege, 
in what would it be different from that which has come down 
to us from the Greeks? 

5 . Which cities in our modern world would be attacked 
first of all if our planet were invaded by people from Mars or 
Saturn? 

6. Could Xew York ever become another Cnossos? 


THE GREEK CITIES 

1. Tell all you know about the lives of the Greek gods. Do 
you like the character of Zeus? 

w 


GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 


463 


2. In what way was life in a Greek city different from 
that in a modern American town? 

3. Could we learn anything at all from the Geeks? If so, 
what ? 

4. And what could the Greeks have learned to advantage 
from us? 

5. Have there always been nations? Or is the Nation, in 
the modern sense of the word (meaning a large and highly 
organized community of people), something new? AVere there 
any nations three thousand years ago? And what would a 
Greek have thought of our large modern states? Would he 
have liked them? 

6. If a Greek were told that our government last year 
spent two billion dollars for warlike purposes and only six 
thousand dollars for the fine arts, what would his comment be? 

GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 

1. AVere the Greek city-states really “democracies” in our 
modern sense of the word? 

2. How many people voted in a Greek state ? 

3. AAHiat would our own country look like if it were gov¬ 
erned along the lines of a Greek city-state? 

4. Did the Greeks believe that all men were equally capa¬ 
ble of taking part in the government of a city or country ? 

5 . AAHiat sort of people did they allow to rule their city? 

6. AVhat would Solon think of our government if he came 
back to life to-day? 

I know perfectly well there are several answers to such 
questions, all of which are more or less correct. \ ou are 
studying history now and you are not solving problems in 
mathematics or in chemistry. History deals with human beings 
and as human beings are strange creatures and refuse to be¬ 
have like machines, there are several sides to every historical 
problem. But I want you to use your brains and your own 
reasoning power to try to get into the other fellow s skin. Sup¬ 
pose that you were Solon and that you were suddenly taken 


464 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


from Athens to New York. What would you, with your Greek 
background, like best in America, and what would you dislike 
most of all ? 


GREEK LIFE 

1. What woidd you have been in a Greek city? Could 

«/ •/ 

you have aspired to a high office? Do you have the necessary 
qualifications? 

2. Would you have had the same chance to improve your 
condition of life in a Greek city, three thousand years ago, that 
you have to-day in America? 

3. Would you have liked to live in Athens or in Sparta, 
and if not, why not? 

4. What would an ancient Greek think of our hurried 
modern way of living? 

5. How could we rearrange our modern life so that it 
would be more like the best expression of the ancient Greek 
spirit ? 

THE GREEK THEATER 

Get the whole class together and try to write and act a. 
Greek play of your own. And by the way, get into the habit 
of going to a library and finding the necessary books upon any 
given subject. Do not forever wait until everything has been 
done for you by your teacher. Do things yourself. Don’t 
ask, “What Greek comedies ought we to look at to get an idea 
of a Greek play ?” or “Can’t the teacher get them for us?” Of 
course she can, but you are not going to learn anything when 
you don’t have to take a little trouble on your own account. Let 
the library be your historical laboratory. In every class, there 
are usually a few boys and girls who like to write plays. Others 
take to acting. Others are good at painting scenery, not to 
mention the necessary stage-hands and musicians. Take an 
incident in the Tro jan War or in the struggle between Athens 
and Sparta and make a Greek play out of it and give a per¬ 
formance in the Greek style. 


THE PERSIAN WARS 


465 


THE PERSIAN WARS 

1. What would have become of Europe if the Greeks had 
not been victorious in the wars against Persia? 

2. Were the Persian wars merely a struggle for conquest, 
or were they something much more primitive, a violent clash 
between two different sorts of civilization? 

3. What could a short Persian domination have taught the 
Greeks to their own great advantage? 

4. Some of the boys and girls I have taught used to re¬ 
enact a famous battle, like that of Marathon, with the help of 
toy soldiers. They used to provide the necessary landscape 
themselves. Could you not do the same thing for Marathon 
and Thermopylae? And, by the way, if you happen to think 
of a nice idea for a new problem, why not tell your teacher? 
She will probably be very grateful and will tell you so. 


ATHENS vs. SPARTA 

1. What ought Athens and Sparta to have done to assure 
the safety of all Greece? Could they ever have found a com¬ 
mon basis for peace? 

2. Do you know anything about recent European history? 
Would Pericles, if he came back to-day, find the world much 
changed or not? 

3. After Athens had lost her {jower, she became even more 
famous as a center of learning and art. Look at the map of 
Europe. Can you find any countries which used to be the 
heart of vast empires and which have lost all political impor¬ 
tance but which fully do their share of the day’s work? For 
example, look at the Norwegians, who once ruled the greater 
part of northwestern Europe. To-day their country is very 
small but they have produced a host of famous men and women 
who have done better work for humanity than the citizens of 
many of the most powerful empires. Can you find other 
countries like that? 


466 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


ALEXANDER THE GREAT 

1. What was the great work done by Alexander the Mace¬ 
donian? 

2. How would the world look to-day if Alexander had 
not lived and fought and perhaps died at just the right mo¬ 
ment ? 

3. Does the world need great men like Alexander, or are 
they harmful to the course of progress? 

4. Suppose that you had been Alexander and had had his 
chance, what would you have done? Would you have stayed 
in Macedonia? 


ROME AND CARTHAGE 

1. Make a map of the western Mediterranean, and show 
how Rome and Carthage were trying to extend their ‘‘spheres 
of influence.” 

2. Are there still any “spheres of influence” left in the 
world ? 

3. What happens when two such circles run across each 
other? When two nations want the same coal mines or oil 
fields ? 

4. Suppose that Carthage had won the war. In what 
way would the world be different to-day? 

5. Compare the policy of Rome toward her citizens with 
the policy of Carthage. Are we like the Romans or like the 
Carthaginians in that respect? 

6. Rome won the war against Carthage because she had 
the better navy. Who won the great European war which 
ended in 1918? 

7. What would have happened during the last great Euro¬ 
pean war if the Allies had not controlled the sea ? 

8. What do you think of Hannibal? What mistakes did 
he make, or was he not responsible for the final defeat of Car¬ 
thage ? 

9. Who are your greatest heroes up to the time of Han¬ 
nibal ? 


THE RISE OF ROME 


467 


THE RISE OF ROME 

1. I have told you how Rome happened. Now look at our 
own history and the conquest of our West. How did your own 
town “happen”? Are we not in many ways like the old Ro¬ 
mans ? 

2. An animated map, if you please, of the Roman Empire 
just before the first war with Carthage and three hundred 
years later. 

3. And still another animated map showing how “Civili¬ 
zation travels westward.” 

THE ROMAN CONQUEST 

1. First of all, can you find in any atlas a map which will 
give you a chance to draw one of your own, showing the main 
highroads of the Roman Empire? What would our country 
be to-day without railroads? How could Rome have survived 
without an excellent system of roads? 

2. Compare the Roman Empire with the Union of semi¬ 
independent states which make up our own country. 

3. How would you have liked to be a Roman citizen in the 
time of the Gracchi? On which side would you have fought? 
After all, do you think that such troubles as occurred in Rome 
two thousand years ago were entirely different from the prob¬ 
lems which vex us? A Roman citizen wore a toga and we wear 
a coat, but are we really so very different from each other? 

4. Suppose that you had been a Roman senator and that 
you had been asked to suggest ways and means to save the fast 
crumbling empire from ruin. What would you have sug¬ 
gested ? 

These are entirely theoretical questions. I know it. But 
you will be well repaid for your trouble if you try to get your 
ideas upon such “theoretical subjects” neatly ordered and ex¬ 
pressed with due respect for logic and detail. Theory and 
practice, as you will discover, are close neighbors. 


468 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 

1. Tell the story of Jesus in your own words, as you have 
learned it from the gospels. 

2. Another hard question. Suppose that you had been a 
young Roman, taught from childhood to respect the old Ro¬ 
man gods, what would you have done if a man from a foreign 
and distant land had appeared in the streets of your Italian 
town and had told you that you were all wrong and that you 
must give up Jupiter and Mars and Neptune and accept an¬ 
other form of religion which was entirely foreign to your 
nature? Do you think that the choice would have been easy? 

THE FALL OF ROME 

1. Draw an animated map showing by the use of your 
colored pencils how the Roman Empire gradually crumbled 
away. 

2. What were the real causes for the fall of Rome? 

3. A Roman of the fourth century probably did not knqw 
that his country was going to ruin. Suppose that you were 
such a Roman and that some wise person with the power of 
prophecy told you what was going to happen during the next 
two hundred years, would you have believed him? And what 
arguments would you have used to show him the absurdities of 
his dreams? 

4. How did the invading barbarians live? And where did 
they come from? 

5. Is there any further danger of our civilization being 
overrun by another set of barbarians? 

6. If some bright Roman had invented gunpowder in the 
third century of our era, would the barbarians with their bows 
and arrows have been able to crush Rome? 

7. Write the diary of an imaginary Roman soldier during 
the period of the great invasions and let him tell of the different 
countries to which he had been called to hold the frontiers 
against the Goths and the Vandals. 

8. Try something new. Write the story of the fall of an 


THE RISE OF THE CHURCH 


469 


imaginary Roman city, conquered by the Barbarians, and write 
it as it would appear in a modern newspaper. 

9. I cannot promise that this will make you great journal¬ 
ists, but such exercises will give you just the point of view 
which I am trying to hammer into your more or less willing 
brains. You have read a good deal of history by now. Sup¬ 
pose that you try to write the newspaper story of the battle of 
Marathon, of the battle of the Thermopylae, and of the Expedi¬ 
tionary Force of Hannibal. And describe, as a modern news¬ 
paper man would do it, the last days of Hannibal. You will 
not contribute much to history, but you will get a great deal of 
training in observing things. 


THE RISE OF THE CHURCH 

1. There is a proverb which says, “All roads lead to 
Rome.” Why is that true to-day, as it was two thousand and 
a thousand years ago ? 

2. In the fourth century Rome ceased to be the political 
center of the world, but what did it become? 

3. Look around you. Look for a couple of days. How 
much of the old Roman civilization has crossed the ocean and is 
part of your own life? 

4. How did it happen that the wild barbarians took to 
Christianity more readily than the highly civilized Romans? 

5. If you had become converted to Christianity in the sixth 
century, what sort of work would you have preferred—to be a 
missionary or to stay at home? 

6. Take twenty lines of any book and rewrite them—care¬ 
fully omitting all words which seem to be of Roman origin. 
How much remains of the sentence? 


MOHAMMED 

1. A map, if you please, of Arabia. 

2. How does it happen that so many people living in the 
desert like Moses and Mohammed take an intense interest in 
the affair of their souls? Would Mohammed have had time for 




470 


THE STOIfY OF MANKIND 


meditation and solitude if he had been born near the noise of an 
elevated railway and had been brought up in one of our modern 
slums ? 

3. What would we probably do if a truck-driver should 
suddenly throw up his job of driving a car between Philadel¬ 
phia and New York and tell us that he had messages for us 
from Allah and that we must accept him as a great prophet of 
Allah? Of course we would. To what do you ascribe the final 
success of Mohammed in the face of all those tremendous diffi¬ 
culties ? 

4. Is Mohammed dead to-day ? Ask anyone who has fol¬ 
lowed the events in Asia Minor these last two years what has 
happened in Turkey. 

5. Why does Mohammedanism have such a hold upon 
people, and why does it attract any races which are not inter¬ 
ested in Christianity? 

6. Why did Europe, during the first thirteen centuries of 
our era, resemble a besieged city? How often were the Mo¬ 
hammedans almost successful in breaking through the barriers 
of the West? 

7. Were not our ancestors a bit careless in their indiffer¬ 
ent attitude toward Byzantium? Would you, if you had been a 
Frenchman of the fifteenth century, have allowed Constanti¬ 
nople to be captured without lending your help in defense of 
the city ? 

8. Can you discover anything in any books or encyclope¬ 
dias about that strange country called Byzantium? 

9. Suppose that there should be another danger of a Mo¬ 
hammedan invasion of Europe, what would we in America do? 
Or would we be like the people of Franee and Germany in the 
fifteenth century, who refused to help Byzantium? 

CHARLEMAGNE 

1. Charlemagne was a great “frontier fighter.” Tell us 
why. 

2. Make an animated map of the life and the work of 
Charlemagne. 


THE NORSEMEN 


471 


3. There are endless books dealing with the period of 
Charlemagne and his great contemporaries like King Alfred, 
who lived across the Channel. Get hold of those books and 
read them. Then come together and let each one of you tell the 
others one of the stories of the Grail or of the Round Table. 

4. Can you think of a nobler character in history than old 
Roland; who died at Roncevaux? Perhaps you can, but then 
give us your reasons. 

5. Is the spirit of loyalty and faithfulness which showed 
itself so magnificentty in the character of Roland dead? Can 
you give any modern examples? 

THE NORSEMEN 

1. Do you know anything at all about carpentering? 
Suppose that you make a model of a Norse ship of the eighth 
century. 

2. Make an animated map of the wandering of the Norse¬ 
men. 

i 

3. Can you get hold of an atlas showing the currents of 
the North Atlantic and of the prevailing winds? Discoveries 
are rarely accidental or detached facts. They hang together 
with such things as currents and winds. Why was it easier for 
the Norsemen to reach Iceland and Greenland and America 
than it would have been for the Indians to sail to Europe? 

4. Europe would have been a strange continent if the In¬ 
dians had reached Norway in the eleventh century, long before 
the discovery of gunpowder. Can you imagine such a state of 
affairs? Write a short paper on the subject. Call it something 
like this: “The story of the first Indian colonies on the coast of 
Norway, and why they failed,” or “The voyage of Noma the 
Red to the unknown lands of the Far East.” 

FEUDALISM 

1. Nowadays, people are very apt to say unpleasant 
things of Feudalism, hut was it really such a bad system? 

2. Why did Feudalism work successfully for such a long 
time? 


472 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


3. Make a drawing of a medieval community, showing the 
relation between serf and nobleman and priest and burgher. 

4. What did the monks do for civilization during the 
early middle ages ? 

5. What did the much-abused knights do? 

6. Who does the work of the monks and the knights now¬ 
adays ? 

7. In several books (in the Britannica for instance) you 
can find pictures of castles and walled cities of the middle ages. 
Cannot you reconstruct such a town with the help of clay and 
some odds and ends which you can get out of your carpenter¬ 
ing shop? 

CHIVALRY 

I suggest that you read this chapter and discuss it with 
your Scout Master. Perhaps you are not a Bov Scout. But 
why not ? 

POPE vs. EMPEROR 

1. What did I tell you about “spheres of influence” when 
we discussed the rivalry between Rome and Carthage? Does 
the story of the struggle between Emperor and Pope suggest 
anything like that? 

2. The circles in this case did not only touch each other on 
the flat surface of the earth. What about that? 

3. Is there still such a conflict in our own day? 

4. What do you know about the Holy Roman Empire? 
Not much, if you have read only this book. Whatever you do, 
never repeat merely what I have told you. Read as much as 
you can. Then try to reach your own conclusions. Parrots 
are very pretty birds, but they are of little use when it comes to 
a serious discussion. Learn to use your own brains. Do not 
copy me. 

5. If you had lived in the eleventh century, would you 
have been for or against Henry IV and why? 

THE CRUSADERS 

1. Maps of the Crusades, if you please. They will depend 


THE MEDIEVAL CITY 


473 


upon the amount of time your teacher intends to give to the 
Crusades. But show at least the land route and the sea route 
to the Holy Land. 

2. Can you find out in the encyclopedia what became of 
Greece after the first disorders of the dark ages? Was Athens 
still a city, and who ruled Athens ? 

3. Nowadays we say, “Go West, young man,” and our 
civilization is moving westward. But how did it appear to he 
moving in the thirteenth century? 

4. I wish that you would try to get some good photo¬ 
graphs or, if possible, see some moving pictures of Venice. 
Then you would see for yourself what the people of the so- 
called dark ages managed to do with the money they made out 
of their commerce. 

5. Did the Crusades do any good to the cause of the per¬ 
secuted pilgrims who visited the Holy Land? 

6. But the Crusades did an enormous amount for the 
civilization of western Europe. Why? And how? 

7. Read The Talisman, if you have not already done so. 
Who was more of a gentleman, the European or the Turk? Or 
had they both their good points and their had ones? 

8. Why would it he impossible to-day to get men to go 
upon a Crusade? 

9. But is the spirit of crusading entirely dead? 

THE MEDIEVAL CITY 

1. Where would you rather live, in the city or in the 
country ? 

2. What has made our country what it is to-day, the city, 
the village, or the country? 

3. What is the most important to-day, the city, the village, 
or the farm? 

4 In what ways do our modern cities differ from the me¬ 
dieval towns? 

5. Have you ever seen any pictures of medieval cities? 
Can you get a few such pictures together and draw a medieval 
citv of your own? 


474 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


6. How did the medieval tailor or baker do business? 

7. What advantages were there in the guild system, and 
what disadvantages? Have we anything nowadays which re¬ 
sembles the medieval guild? 

8. Write a short paper upon “Gunpowder and Democ¬ 
racy” and describe the influence of the invention of the new 
weapon called the “gun” upon the political development of the 
middle ages. 

9. Was there any “money” in the middle-ages? Was 
there much of it or little? 

MEDIEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 

1. Describe the origin of the parliamentary system of gov¬ 
ernment. 

2. Did the Greeks have a parliamentary system, or was 
their government more like our own old-time town-meeting? 

3. You have probably read Ivanhoe. Was the Richard of 
that book really very much like the Richard of history? 

4. What are the oldest republics in the world? 

5. Why is a republican and representative form of gov¬ 
ernment so very difficult to maintain? What are its greatest 
advantages ? 

THE MEDIEVAL WORLD 

1. In what way was the medieval world entirely different 
from ours? 

2. Why would we probably he very unhappy in a medi¬ 
eval city? 

3. Was there much chance for the man of ambition in a 
medieval town? 

4. Do we feel quite as certain of our livelihood as the aver¬ 
age man of the middle ages who had learned a trade and who 
belonged to one of the established classes of society or to a 
good guild? What was the disadvantage of such “safety?” 

5. Do you think'the title of the “dark ages” quite fair? Are 
we really so very different from those people who according to 
our notions lived in “darkness?” Would not a Florentine of 


MEDIEVAL TRADE 


475 


the twelfth century find much in our mode of living which 
would not be to his taste? 

MEDIEVAL TRADE 

1. A large map, if you please, with all the trade routes of 
the middle ages. 

2. Write a short paper and describe the origin of Venice 
and Genoa, and give the importance of those cities as the 
greatest colonial powers of the middle ages. 

3. What did Marco Polo do, and how much of his story 
was true and how much imaginary? In order to know this, 
you must have read his Travels. Go ahead and read them. 
I don’t know where you can find the book in your town. I 
know where I can get a copy whenever I need one. I had to 
find out for myself. Do likewise. The librarian will help you. 

4. What was the Hansa? 

5. What happened to those people of the middle ages, 
once they were able to leave the sheltering walls of their cities 
and monasteries and castles and could visit each other and 
exchange ideas without fear of sudden attack and equally sud¬ 
den death? 

6. How did trade and commerce help civilization in the 
middle ages ? 

7. Do they always help civilization? For example, in 
distant African ports or along the coast of China? 

8. How did the people of the middle ages keep informed 
of what was happening in the world, since they had no news¬ 
papers? 

THE RENAISSANCE 

1. How did the universities begin? 

2. What did the universities try to do? How did they 
influence the thought and the actions of men and women of the 
middle ages? 

3. Are the universities as important to-day as they were 
six hundred years ago? 

4. What do you know about the Troubadours? 


476 


THE STORY OF MANKIND 


5. Have you ever tried to do something the Troubadours 
did? Turn a common event of the day into a short piece of 
poetry. Try it. 

6. Did the people of the middle ages feel that they be¬ 
long to a “nation” as we do nowadays? Or to an empire, as 
the Romans did ? 

7. What was the advantage of a world-language like 
Latin during the middle ages ? 

8. Why not another world-language to-day? Would the 
consciousness of belonging to this or that or the other nation 
(which we have to-day) make it more difficult for people to 
accept a common language? 

9. Tell what you know of as many universities as you have 
read about. 

10. What do you know about Dante? Why is he such 
an important historical figure ? 

11. In what way is the Renaissance quite different from 
our own time? Do we think that art is a very important part 
of our daily lives ? 

12. Can you imagine the people of your own town going 
to the station to do homage to a great poet who is honoring 
their town with a visit? Or getting excited about a new manu¬ 
script of a speech made two thousand years ago by Cicero? 
And why not? Would the Renaissance have been interested 
in a great baseball-player ? 

13. What sort of man was Savonarola? Are there al¬ 
ways people like him in every country? 

14. Why was Italy predestined to become the center of 
the great movement which we now call the Renaissance ? Why 
did it not start in Norway or in Russia or in Massachusetts? 

15. Do you think that the Renaissance has influenced our 
own lives? 

16. Is there a chance for another renaissance within our 
own lifetime? I think so, but do you? 

17. In what way does our world resemble the period fol¬ 
lowing the last half of the middle ages? 

18. If one of the great Renaissance painters or sculptors 


EPILOGUE 


477 


came to your own town, what would he like and what would he 
dislike ? 

19. If you had had your own choice, in what period of the 
world’s history (as described thus far in The Story of Man¬ 
kind) would you have liked to be born? 

20. How many of you would have preferred to be alive 
during the Renaissance ? 


EPILOGUE 

We hope that this book will be used bv all sorts of teachers with all 
sorts of prejudices and preferences. 

Some of them will be bound by the rules of religious schools. 

Others again will have to obey certain instructions of a different nature. 

We do not want to force our opinions on you. We have merely tried 
to show what sort of questions we ourselves would ask if we happened to 
use The Story of Mankind as a textbook. 

We are dreadfully afraid of laying down the law for a new and fixed 
“historical system.” The time for such a drastic step has not yet come. We 
therefore offer these few questions merely as hints. 

The exercises for the following chapters we shall leave entirely to the 
discretion of the teachers. 

It is impossible for one man to invent an entirely new system of instruc¬ 
tion. He needs the help of all those who are engaged in the same sort 
of work. If those teachers who take a serious interest in “humanizing” 
history will give me the benefit of their suggestions and their advice, we may 
be able, together, to create something new and useful. 

And with my politest bow, I utter an anticipatory “Thank you.” 


HENDRICK WILLEM VAN LOON. 






INDEX 


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INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 


The numbers refer to pages. Where several references are given, the pages on which 
the principal description is to be found are indicated by heavier type. 


Abdallah (ab'dal'la), 129 
Abelard (&b'§-lard), 202 
Abu-Bekr (a'boo-bek'T), 130, 133 
Abyssinia (&b'ys-sln'l!-a), 223, 433 
Achaeans, 50, 77 
Acre, 164 

Acropolis (a-kr6p'o-lis), 55, 73, 376, 422, 
439 

Actium, 109 
Adams, John, 324 
Aden, 223 

Adrianople (&d / rf-&n-o'p , l), 120 
Adriatic Sea (ad'ri-at'ik), 48, 164 
Aegeans (e-je'ans), 50, 51, 69 
Aegean Sea (e-je'an), 39, 42, 43-48, 52, 
70, 71, 81, 86, 193 
Aeschylus (es'ki-lus), 62, 67 
Africa, 10, 16, 17, 21, 81, 83, 99, 104, 
134, 194, 221, 223, 228, 230, 233, 245, 
256, 263, 314, 377, 408, 433 
Ahmed (ah'mSd), 129 
Aix-la-Chapelle, 136 
Ajaccio (a-yat'cho), 340 
Akkadians, 31, 32 
Alaric (STa-rlk), 120 
Alba, Duke of, 245, 260 
Albany, 395 
Albert of Sardinia, 381 
Alcibiades (&l'si-bl'a-dez), 76 
Aldus, 215 
Alemanni, 120 

Alembert, d’ (da'lan'bar'), 328 
Alexander of Battenberg, 436 
Alexander the Great, 27, 33, 55, 77-79, 
99, 105, 128, 129, 153, 185, 223, 341, 
439 

Alexander I of Russia, 346, 356, 359- 


Alexander II of Russia, 409, 436 

Alexander VI, Pope, 230, 250 

Alexandria, 27, 106, 185, 392 

Alexis, 300 

Alexis, Emperor, 160 

Algarve (al-gar'vS), 221 

Algiers (&l-jerz'), 433 

Ali, 133 

Allia River, 91 

Alphonso III, 221 

Alps, 86, 93, 96, 103, 105, 135, 138, 154, 
157, 162, 204, 247 
Alsace (al-sac'), 268 
America, 21, 200, 224, 245, 258, 259, 
276, 292, 305, 308, 314, 317, 331, 349, 
361, 370, 372, 374, 380, 385, 408, 419, 
443 

Americans, 361 
Aminah, 129 
Amorites, 32 
Ampere (an'par'), 399 
Amsterdam (&m'ster-d8m), 218, 263, 
415 

Anabaptists, 254 

Andersen, 184 

Angles (an'gl’z), 143, 271 

Anglicans, 281 

Anne of England, 284, 285 

Antiochus III (an-tl'6-khs), 100 

Antony, Mark, 107, 109, 110 

Antwerp (&nt'werp), 215 

Appomattox (S-p'5-mat'uks), 410 

Arabia, 21, 32, 130, 219 

Arabs, 129 

Arago, 399 

Arameans, 129 

Archangel (ark-an'j&l), 277, 292 
Arezzo (a-rgt'so). 2Q£ 


361, 364, 369, 374, 375, 379, 389 

479 



480 


INDEX 


Aristides (&r'Is-ti'dez), 72 
Aristophanes (ar'is-tbf'a-nez), 68 
Aristotle (Sr'is-tot' 4), 77, 185, 186, 188, 
208, 209, 216 

Arkwright, Richard, 394, 395 

Armada, Spanish (ar-ma'da), 263, 275 

Armenia, 28, 164 

Armenians, 164 

Arno River, 204, 208 

Aryans, 40, 236 

Ashur, 32 

Asia, 21, 26-29, 32, 36, 42, 54, 69, 70, 
74, 79, 81, 91, 97, 104, 105, 118, 123, 
128, 129, 134, 146, 160-162, 227, 240, 
242, 245, 263, 314, 376, 377, 399, 
443 

Asia Minor, 43, 52, 69, 74, 88, 96, 100, 
104, 111, 115, 158, 160, 165, 193 
Assyria (8,-sir'i-a), 27, 40, 55, 169, 422, 
430 

Assyrians, 30, 32, 129 
Athena, 75 

Athenians, 59, 61, 71, 75, 76 
Athens, 42, 50, 59, 62, 71-77, 89, 100, 
116, 122, 127, 164, 193, 376 
Athos, Mount (&th'os), 70 
Atlantic Ocean, 221, 224, 228, 232, 325, 
343 

Attica, 67, 99 
Augsburg, 157 

Augustus, 27, 128, 138, 146, 185 
Austerlitz (os'ter-lits), 345 
Australia, 230 
Australians, 325 

Austria, 245, 259, 335, 337, 344, 346, 
356, 361, 366, 375, 380, 430, 436 
Austrians, 382, 436 
Autun (o'tun'), 356 
Avars (a-vars'), 120 
Avignon (a've'nyon'), 213 
Azores (a-zorz'), 221, 227 

Babel (ba'bel), 31 

Babylon, 31-33, 40, 49, 51, 55, 79, 133, 
360 

Babylonia, 34, 169 

Babylonians, 30, 81, 90, 121, 122, 129. 
414, 421, 428 

Bach, Johann Sebastian (bak), 431 


Bacon, Roger, 186, 188, 218, 415 

Bagdad, 133 

Balboa (bal-b5'a), 228 

Balkans, 365, 375, 435 

Baltic Sea, 195, 266, 293, 302, 304 

Baltimore, 399 

Barcelona (bar'se-lo'na), 227 

Basel (ba'zel), 215 

Basques, 136 

Batavia, 218 

Battenberg, 436 

Bavaria (ba-va'n-a), 266, 366, 377, 381 
Beethoven, Ludwig van (van ba'to- 
ven), 431, 432 
Behistun (ba'hls-toon'), 29 
Belgians, 379 

Belgium, 245, 246, 263, 290, 339, 349, 
363, 379, 434 

Bell, Alexander Graham, 399 
Bellerophon, 350 
Bentham, Jeremy, 407 
Berezina River (ber-ya'ze-na), 347 
Berlin, 300, 337, 389, 435, 436 
Bernadotte (bur'na-dot'), 364 
Bethlehem, 110, 242 
Birmingham, 395 

Bismarck, Otto von (bis'mark), 382, 
383, 386-388, 435 
Black, George, 365 
Black Sea, 103, 194, 293 
Blanc, Louis (blan), 412 
Blucher (blii'ker), 349 
Boccaccio (bok-ka'cho), 206 
Bohemia, 211, 266, 387 
Bokhara (bo-ka'ra), 295 
Boleyn, Anne (bobbin), 275 
Bolivar, Simon (b5l'i-var), 372 
Bologna (bo-lon'ya), 202 
Bolsheviki, 426 
Bonaparte, Joseph, 372 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 17, 140, 335, 339, 
340-351, 354, 357, 364-368, 370, 372, 
380, 384, 405, 431, 439 
Boniface, 136 

Bordeaux (bor'do'), 134, 200 
Borneo, 229 
Bosnia, 436 

Bosporus (b5s'po-rus), 208 
Boulton (bol'tun), 395 



INDEX 


481 


Bourbons (boor'bun), 268, 312, 319, 
348, 357, 361, 363, 378, 379 
Brahma (bra/ma), 237, 238 
Brandenburg, 304, 305 
Brazil, 221, 228, 230, 265, 365, 385 
Bremen, 195 
Brennabor, 304 
Brenner Pass, 172 

Brienne, Cardinal Lom6nie de, 332, 333, 
340 

Britannia, 271 

British India, 40 

British Indian Colonies, 17 

British Isles, 180 

Brittany, 202 

Brussels, 379, 412 

Bryan, William J., 416 

Buddha (bood'a), 233, 234, 238, 243 

Buddhism, 238, 256 

Bulgaria, 435, 436, 439 

Bunsen, 417 

Burgundians, 120 

Burgundy (bur'gun-di), 213 

Byron, Lord George Gordon, 377 

Byzantine Empire, 295, 298 

Byzantium, 118, 121, 128, 164, 208 

Cabot, Giovanni (kab'ut), 228, 276, 317 

Cabot, Sebastian, 228 

Cadiz (ka/diz), 39 

Caesar, 27, 104-107, 146, 271 

Caesarea, 111, 114 

Calicut, 223 

Calvin, John, 254, 256, 260 

Calvinists, 254 

Cambyses (kam-bl'sez), 27 

Canaanites, 37 

Canary Islands, 221 

Cannae, 95 

Cannes (kan), 348 

Cannibal Islands, 208 

Canning, George, 374, 377 

Cano, Sebastian del, 230 

Canossa, 157 

Canute the Great, 271 

Cape of Good Hope, 223, 224, 265 

Cape Mycale (mik'a-le), 74 

Cape Trafalgar (traf'£l-gar'), 345, 395 

Cape Verde (vurd), 221 


Cape Verde Islands, 221 
Capua, 95 

Caracas (ka-ra'-kas), 372 
Carbonari (kar'bo-na'ri), 374 
Carolinas, 317, 320, 394 
Carpathian Mountains (kar-pa'-thl-an), 
147, 304, 381 

Carthage, 82-85, 91, 92, 95-97, 99, 101, 
129, 439 

Carthaginians, 91-93, 96, 100, 232 
Cartier, 319 

Cartwright, Edmund, 394 
Caspian Sea, 40 

Castlereagh (has' 4-ra'), 359, 361 
Cathay, 29, 227, 230 
Catherine of Medici, 275 
Catherine the Great, 345, 359 
Catholics, 244, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259, 
283, 305, 385, 413 
Catiline, 105 

Cavour (ka'voor'), 383, 384 
Central Asia, 40, 293 
Ceylon, 265 
Chadija, 130 

Chaldeans (kal-de'ans), 33, 129, 414 
Champlain (sham'plan'), 319 
Champollion (shan'pol'yon'), 18, 29 
Chancellor, Richard, 276, 292 
Channa, 234, 236, 237 
Charlemagne (shar'le-man), 135-140, 
141, 146, 154, 188, 304, 344, 441 
Charles Alexander de Calonne, 331, 332 
Charles of Anjou (an'zhoo'), 158 
Charles the Bold, 137, 245 
Charles I of England, 279-283, 345 
Charles II of England, 282, 283 
Charles II of Spain, 290 
Charles V of Spain, 229, 245, 246, 252, 
261, 312 

Charles VI of Austria, 306 
Charles X of France, 378, 380 
Charles X of Sweden, 303 
Charles XI of Sweden, 303 
Charles XII of Sweden, 303 
Charles XIV of Sweden, 364 
Childeric (chil'der-ik), 136 
China, 217, 219, 227, 232, 233, 238, 240, 
242, 265, 269 

Chinese, 238, 240, 242, 325 



482 


INDEX 


Chios, 224, 376 

Christ, 33, 42, 70, 93, 102, 134, 153, 185, 
202, 233, 242, 250, 279, 392. See Jesus 
Christian IV of Denmark, 266 
Christina of Sweden, 303 
Cicero, 105 
Cimbri, 103 

Cisalpine Gaul (sls-81'pln), 106 
Clement V, Pope, 222 
Clement XIV, Pope, 369 
Cleopatra, 27, 107, 109 
Clovis, 135 
Cnossus, 46, 52 
Colbert, 312 

Coligny, Admiral de (de-ko'len'ye'), 245 
Columbus, 29, 134, 219, 224, 225, 227, 
228, 230, 276, 292, 436 
Compiegne (kon'py&n'y’), 273, 410 
Confederate States of America, 410 
Confucianism, 242 
Confucius, 238, 240, 242, 243 
Congo, 207 

Congo Free State, 434 
Connecticut, 395 
Conrad IV, 158 
Conrad V, 158 

Constantine, 118, 121,125, 126,160, 385 
Constantine Paleologus, 128 
Constantinople, 118, 126, 128, 137, 160, 
162, 208, 292, 293, 296, 298, 369, 375, 
426, 435 

Cook, Captain, 325 
Copenhagen, 364 

Copernicus, Nicolaus (ko-ptir'ni-kus), 
224, 416 
Cordova, 186 
Cornelia, 103 
Corinth, 100, 117 
Corinth, Isthmus of, 74 
Correggio (kor-red'jo), 427 
Corsica (kor'si-ka), 340 
Corsicana, 340 
Cossacks, 347 
Cracow (kra'ko), 203 
Crassus, 105 
Cretans, 36, 48 
Crete (kret), 45, 46, 164, 232 
Cristofori, Bartolomeo, 430 
Cromwell, Oliver, 281, 282, 312 


Cuba, 410, 434, 435 
Cultellus, Aesculapius, 111, 112 
Cynoscephalae (sIn'6s-sSf'a-le), 99 
Cyprus, 164 
Cyrus, 42 

Czartoryski, Prince Adam (char'tS-rSs'- 
ke), 363 

Dacia, 375 
Damascus, 133 

Danes, 143, 268, 271, 386, 387 
Dante, 303-306 
Danton, 337, 338 
Danube River, 49, 77, 120, 435 
Darien Peak, 228 
Darius (da-ri'us), 29, 42 
Darwin, Charles, 415, 417 
Day, 399 

Delaware River, 395 
Denmark, 141, 181, 185, 196, 266, 303, 
364, 386 
Deucalion, 49 

Deutschland (doich'land), 138 
Deventer, 211, 249 
De Witt, Jan, 290, 291 
Diaz, Bartholomew (de'ash), 223 
Diderot (ded'ro'), 328 
Dionysos (dl'o-nl'sus), 66, 67 
Disraeli (diz-ra'le), 435, 439 
Dissenters, 283 
Dneiper River (ne'per), 293 
Dneister River (nes'ter), 293 
Don Carlos, 259 
Don Quixote, 152 
Draco, 59, 89 

Dutch, 232, 247, 276, 314, 315 : 394, 409 
Dutch East India Company, 230, 263, 
264 

Dutch Republic, 265, 266, 269, 284, 363 
Dvina (dve-na'), 292 

Edinburgh (ed"n-bur-6), 281, 283 
Edison, Thomas, 400 
Edward the Confessor, 143, 145 
Egypt, 16, 17, 21, 26-29, 32, 34, 40, 
42, 54, 55, 77, 79, 80, 81, 91, 99, 106, 
107, 109, 128, 133, 169, 177, 186, 
193, 197, 223, 339, 342, 345, 376, 422, 
430, 433 




INDEX 


483 


Egyptians, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22-24, 34, 
39, 81, 90, 106, 121, 149, 414, 421, 
423, 428, 444 
Elba, 347, 349 

Elizabeth, Queen, 262, 275-278, 282 
312, 398 

Elster River, 347 
Elzevier (el'ze-ver), 216 
Ems (ams), 388 
Engels, Friedrich, 412 
Enghien, Duke of (an'g&n 7 ), 342 
England, 105, 127, 141, 142, 145, 179, 
195, 196, 224, 248, 249, 254, 262, 265, 
266, 269-272, 274, 275, 277, 278, 
280-286, 290, 292, 300, 305, 310, 
312, 317, 319, 320, 322, 324, 344-346, 
349, 356, 359, 361, 372, 374, 376-378, 
384, 387, 392, 394, 395, 405, 409, 412, 
427, 434-436, 438 

English, 232, 247, 263, 271, 273, 276, 
314, 315, 331, 349 
English Channel, 263, 271, 272 
Englishmen, 202, 376 
Ensa; Gladius, 112, 115 
Ephesus (ef'e-sus), 111 
Ephialtes, 73 
Epicureans, 122 

Erasmus (e-raz'mus), 200, 249, 250 
Erfurt, 250, 252 
Eskimos, 225 
Etienne (a'tyen 7 ), 215 
Etruscans, 86, 88, 253 
Eugenie de Montijo (u'zha'ne 7 ), 
388 

Euphrates River (u-fra/tez), 28, 34, 133, 
232, 421 

Euripides (u-rip'i-dez), 62, 67 
Europe, 29, 39, 40, 42, 70, 74, 77, 83, 
116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 127, 129, 134- 
137, 140, 141, 146, 147, 149, 150, 155, 
157, 160, 161, 165, 166, 169, 177, 180, 
185, 186, 191, 193-195, 197, 200, 
202, 208, 211, 213, 215, 218, 219, 223, 
227, 228, 233, 247, 248, 251, 253, 265, 
266, 269, 271, 280, 285, 287, 289-293, 
296, 298-300, 302-304, 306, 310, 312, 
322, 324, 336, 341, 343, 347, 348, 354, 
356, 359, 361-363, 367, 368, 370, 371, 
374-380, 383, 384, 387, 389, 391, 392, 


394, 399, 405, 409, 410, 413, 419, 422, 
431, 435, 436, 442, 443 
Eyck, Jan van (van-Ik 7 ), 426 
Eyck, Hubert van, 426 

Faraday, Michael, 399, 4C0 
Faroe Islands (far'o), 224, 225 
Fatima, 133 
Feodor (fli-o'dor), 298 
Feodor, 299 

Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, 436 
Ferdinand of Aragon, 227, 245 
Ferdinand of Austria, 381, 382 
Ferdinand of Naples, 274 
Ferdinand of Spain, 259 
Ferdinand II of Hapsburg, 265, 266 
Ferdinand VII of Spain, 365 
Finland, 303 
Fire Islands, 228 
Fitch, John, 395, 396 
Flanders, 206, 246 

Florence, 193, 194, 204-206, 208,209,385 

Florentines, 193, 210 

Florida, 276 

Formosa, 433 

Forum, 422 

Fournier, Francois (foor'nya 7 ), 412 
Fra Angelico, 215 

France, 83, 85, 105, 120, 129, 134, 138, 
141, 142, 146, 158, 161, 168, 180, 194, 
195, 206, 213, 245, 247, 268, 272, 284, 
287, 288, 290, 317, 319, 325-328, 330, 
332-334, 336, 337, 339, 344, 345, 347, 
359, 361, 363, 375, 377-381, 383-385, 
387, 394, 395, 412, 427, 433, 434 
Francis II of France, 275 
Francis Joseph of Austria, 382 
Frankfort, 366, 382, 385 
Franklin, Benjamin, 322, 399 
Franks, 120, 125, 135, 137, 304, 344 
Frederick Barbarossa, 158 
Frederick of Bohemia, 266 
Frederick of Hohenzollern, 305 
Frederick the Great, 305-307, 366, 444 
Frederick William I, 305 • 

Frederick II, 158 

French, 269, 318, 340, 344, 349, 387, 395 
Frohen, 215 

Fulton, Robert, 395, 399 





484 


INDEX 


Gabriel, 130 

Galilee, Sea of, 114 

Galileo (gal'i-le'o), 256, 391, 416, 417 

Galvani (gal-va'ne), 399 

Gama, Vasco da (da ga'ma), 219, 227 

Garibaldi (g&r'i-b&l'di), 383 

Gates of Hercules, 98, 134 

Gaul, 105, 137 

Gauls, 91, 93 

Genesis, 417 

Geneva, 256 

Genoa (jen'o-a), 162. 191, 194, 195, 200, 
230 

Genoese, 221, 340 
George I of England, 285, 286 
George II of England, 286 
George III of England, 262, 320, 322, 
349 

Georgia, 394 

German Confederation, 382, 386, 387, 
389 

German Empire, 181, 253, 305, 389 
Germania, 138 
German Mannerchors, 386 
Germans, 141, 202, 246-248, 252, 306, 
366, 385, 386, 389 
German Turnvereins, 386 
Germany, 136, 141, 157, 159, 215, 245, 
248, 251, 253, 259, 265, 266, 268, 271, 
305, 307, 346, 366, 369, 381, 382, 384- 
387, 412, 433, 434 
Ghent (gent), 195, 245 
Ghibellines, 204 
Gibraltar, 134, 221 
Gilbert, William, 398 
Giotto (jot'to), 203, 215 
Girondists, 338 
Gladstone, William E., 438 
Goa, 223 

God, 114, 115, 123, 124, 126, 186, 209, 
213, 252, 260, 262, 279, 341, 346, 360, 
366, 384, 414, 419 

Godfrey of Bouillon (god'frwa/), 161 

Godunow, Boris (ga'ddo-nof'), 298 

Golgotha, 112, 242 

Gordon, 152 

Goshen, 26 

Goths, 120, 127 

Gracchus (gr&k'tis), 103 


Gracchus, Gaius (ga'yus), 103 

Gracchus, Tiberius, 103 

Graian Pass, 93 

Granada, 134, 227 

Grant, U. S., 410 

Gratian, 202 

Great Lakes, 318 

Greece, 38-40, 42, 43, 52, 5?, 66, 72, 
73, 76, 77, 81, 86, 93, 100, 101, 106, 
115, 117, 153, 164, 169, 170, 177, 
185, 232, 247, 375, 377, 378, 438, 439 
Greeks, 16, 24, 25, 28, 39, 42, 44, 45, 
48, 49-52, 53-55, 57, 61, 62, 64-67, 
69, 70-72, 74, 77, 81, 83, 88-90, 100, 
114, 121, 122, 129, 149, 164, 184, 190, 
208, 232, 293, 365, 366, 375-377, 391, 
414, 421-423, 428, 444 
Greenland, 224, 225, 430 
Greenwich, 230 
Gregory I, Pope, 127 
Gregory VII, Pope, 155, 157, 158, 160, 
179 ‘ 

Grimm, 184 

Groot, Gerhard (gr5t), 211 
Grotefend (gro'te-fent), 29 
Grotius (gro'shi-us), 264 
Guelphs (gwelfs), 204 
Guericke, Otto von (ga/ri-ke), 398 
Guido (gwe'do), 430 
Guinea (gin'i), 222 
Gulf of Mexico, 318 

Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, 266, 
268, 303 

Gutenberg, Johann, 215 

Haarlem (har'lem), 216, 415 
Haiti, 372 
Hals, Frans, 427 
Hamburg, 195 
Hamm, 378 

Hammurabi (ham'ob-ra'be), 32, 49, 79 

Hannibal, 93, 95-97, 99, 100, 129, 134 

Hapsburgs, 266, 289-291, 381-383, 387 

Hargreaves, James, 394 

Harold of Wessex, 145, 272 

Hasdrubal, 96 

Hastings, 145, 272 

Havana, 435 

Hawaiians, 325 



INDEX 


485 


Hebrews, 26, 34, 114 
Heemskerk, van (hams'kerk), 263 
Heine (hl'ne), 351 

Hellas, 53, 56, 66, 74, 76, 77, 89, 202, 
327 

Hellen, 49 

Hellenes, 49, 50, 52, 81, 89, 99, 376 
Hellespont, 100 

Henry the Navigator, 221, 222, 226 
Henry III of England, 180 
Henry IV of Germany, 155, 157, 179 
Henry VII of England, 274, 276, 277 
Henry VIII of England, 254, 274-277 
Herculaneum (hur'ku-la'ne-um), 398 
Hercules, 93 
Hero of Alexandria, 392 
Herzegovina (her'tse-go-ve'na), 436 
Hildebrand, 155 

Himalaya Mountains (hi-ma'la-ya), 79, 
233, 238 

Hippocrates (hi-pok'ra-tez), 202 
Hittites, 32 
Hofer, Andreas, 342 
Hohenstaufens (ho'en-shtou'fen), 179 
Hohenzollerns (ho'en-tsol'ern), 305, 388 
Holland, 141, 182, 245, 249, 260, 262, 
269, 275, 280, 290, 300, 310, 312, 317, 
320, 346, 384, 415, 427 
Hollanders, 260, 371 
Holstein, 386 

Holy Roman Empire, 138, 268, 344 
Homer, 44, 86, 102, 208, 429 
Horace, 216, 249 
Hotham, Admiral, 350 
Hudson, Henry, 265 
Huguenots, 268, 317 
Hungarians, 147 
Hungary, 161, 202, 381 
Huns, 120, 135, 147, 150 
Huss, Johannes, 211, 251 
Hutton, Ulrich von, 252 
Huygens, Christian (hl'genz), 392 
Hyksos, 26, 27, 34 

Iceland, 182, 224, 225 
India, 77, 153, 223, 233, 236, 238, 319, 
345, 435 

Indian Ocean, 230, 314 
Indians, 227, 236, 293, 408, 409 


Indies, 218, 223, 226-228, 230, 232, 259, 
263-265, 276, 277 
Indo-Europeans, 40, 237 
Indus River, 40 
Ingelheim, 136 
Innocent III, Pope, 179 
Ireland, 263 
Iris, 23 

Isabella of Castile, 227, 245 
Italians, 202, 246, 247, 364, 371, 424 
Italy, 38, 39, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 95, 100, 
104-106, 120, 127, 136, 137, 141, 158, 
174, 191, 202, 204, 205, 215, 245, 247, 
268, 308, 339, 343, 344, 346, 374, 381, 
383, 385, 427, 430, 433 
Ivan III of Russia, 128, 196, 298 
Ivan the Terrible, 298 

Jackson, Thomas, 410 
Jacobins, 337, 338, 344, 352, 362 
Jaffe, 217 

James I of England, 266, 277-279, 
285 

James II of England, 283, 284 
Jan de Witt, 290, 291 
Japan, 217, 219, 228, 238, 265, 433, 443 
See Zipangu 
Japanese, 325 

Jefferson, Thomas, 138, 324 
Jehovah, 36, 37, 115 
Jenghiz Khan (jen'giz kan'), 295, 439 
Jerusalem, 37, 105, 112-114, 158, 162, 
165, 258 

Jesuits, 259, 368 

Jesus, 114, 121-123, 160, 258, 293. See 
Christ 

Jews, 31, 34, 36-38, 81, 122, 129, 161, 
172, 428 

Joan of Arc, 213, 273 
John of England, 179, 180 
John of Oldenbarneveldt, 269 
Joseph, 110, 112-115 
Josephine, 341 

Joshua of Nazareth, 111, 114, 115. See 

Jesus 

Jovian, 126 
Judea, 112, 113 
Julian, 126 
Julius II, Pope, 250 




486 


INDEX 


Jupiter, 88, 122, 423 
Justinian, 126 

Kalka River, 295 

Kameroon (ka'ma-roon'), 433 

Kattegat (k&t'e-gat'), 364 

Kay, John, 394 

Kempen, 211, 249 

Kernpis, Thomas a, 211, 213, 249 

Kent, 271 

Khan of Cathay, 217 
Khartoum (kar'toom'), 152 
Kholmogory, 292 
Khufu, 24 

Kiaochou (kyou'cho'), 433 
Kiev (ke'yef), 293 
Kirchhoff, 417 
Kirkpatrick, William, 388 
Knut (k’noot), 143 
Koliyans, 234 
Korea, 433 

Kossuth, Louis (kosh'bbt), 381 
Kremlin, 298, 344, 346 

Labrador, 224, 276 
Ladrones, 229 
Lafayette, 377 
Lake Ilmen, 293 
Lake Ladoga, 293 
Lake Trasimene, 95 
Lamarck, 417 
La Navidad, 227 
Lancashire, 394 
Lancelot, 151, 168 
Langley, Professor, 396 
Laplace, Marquis de, 417 
La Salle, 319 

Lao-Tse (la'6-tsu'), 240, 242 
Latins, 88, 90, 422 
Lebreton, 328 

Leclerc, General (le kler'), 372 
Lee, Richard Henry, 324 
Lee, Robert E., 410 
Leibnitz, Gottfried (llp'mts), 391 
Leif, 224 

Leipzig (llp'sik), 252, 347, 391, 431 
Leo III, Pope, 137, 344 
Leo VIII, Pope, 138 
Leo X, Pope, 250 


Leonidas, 73 

Leopold of Belgium, 379, 434 

Lexington, 325 

Leyden (ll'den), 260, 261 

Liege (le-ezh'), 206 

Lincoln, Abraham, 410 

Lisbon, 228, 263 

Lithuanians, 304 

Liverpool, 396, 397 

Livingston, Robert R., 395 

Lombards, 127, 172 

London, 263, 281, 392, 394, 406, 412 

Longobards, 120, 136, 172 

Longwood, 343 

Louis Bonaparte of Holland, 384 
Louis Philippe (fe'lep'), 380 
Louis XIV of France, 283,285, 287-291, 
306, 312, 319, 326, 327, 330, 389, 428, 
444 

Louis XVI of France, 332, 335, 337, 
347, 405 

Louis XVIII of France. 268, 347, 357, 
378 

Louisiana, 349 

Lovat River, 293 

Loyola (lo-y5'la), 258, 277 

Liibeck, 196 

Lucifer, 205 

Lumbini, 234 

Luther, Martin, 244, 250-254, 260, 277 
Lutherans, 254, 258 
Liitzen, 268 
Lydia, 69 

Lyell, Sir Charles (ll'el), 417 
Lyons, Academy of, 341 

Macaulay, Zachary, 409 
Macchiavelli, Niccold (ma'kya-vel'le), 
215, 342 

Macedonia, 77, 99, 100, 101, 186 
Macedonians, 77, 96, 99, 365 
Madagascar (mad'a-g&s'kar), 223, 433 
Madeira Islands (ma-de'ra), 221 
Madrid, 200, 325, 336 
Madrilenes, 345 
Magdeburg, 268, 398 
Magellan, 217-219, 228-230 
Magna Carta, 179, 180, 262 
Magnesia, 100 



INDEX 


487 


Maha Maya, 233, 234 
Maine, 317 
Mainz, 215 
Malabar, 228 
Malacca (ma-l&k'a), 264 
Malaga, 388 
Manchester, 397 
Marathon, 71, 74 
Marconi, Guglielmo, 399 
Marcus Aurelius, 185 
Mardonius, 74 
Marengo, 345 
Margaret, 246 
Margenta, 385 
Maria, 284 

Maria Theresa, 290, 335 
Marie Antoinette, 330, 369 
Marie Louise of Parma, 380 
Marius, 103, 104, 106 
Marquette (mar'ket'), 319 
Marquis de Laplace, 417 
Marquis de Pombal, 368 
Marquis of Worchester, 392 
Marseilles, 39, 194 
Martel, Charles, 134, 136, 410 
Martinique (mar'ti-nek'), 342 
Marx, Karl, 412, 413 
Mary, 245 
Mary, 110 
Mary, 284 

Mary Stuart, 275-277 
Mary, Queen, 263 
Massachusetts, 320, 324 
Mauretania, 134 

Maximilian, Duke of Austria, 245, 387 

Mazzini, 383 

McKinley, William, 435 

Mecca, 130, 131, 223 

Medes, 42 

Media, 42 

Medici (med'6-che), 194, 223, 275 
Medici, Silvestro dei, 174 
Medina, 130, 131, 223 
Mediterranean Sea, 16, 26, 38, 58, 81, 
85, 86, 97, 100, 101, 106, 111, 129, 
221, 223, 224, 230, 232, 304, 340, 347, 
377, 414, 424, 425, 439 
Melis, 73 
Mercia, 271 


Merovech, 135 
Merovingians, 135, 136 
Mesopotamia, 28-31, 33, 54, 80, 81,177, 
232 

Messiah, 112 

Metternich (mSt'er-mk), 356, 357, 359, 
362, 374-378, 381, 389 
Metz, 268 
Mexicans, 387 
Mexico, 374 
Mexico, Gulf of, 318 
Michael, 298 
Michael Angelo, 215, 427 
Milan, 381 

Miletus (ml-le'tus), 398 
Miltiades (mil-tl'a-dez), 71, 72 
Minerva, 122 
Mirabeau (me'ra'bo'), 336 
Mississippi River, 18, 318 
Missolonghi (mis'o-lon'ge), 377 
Mithridates, 103-105, 107 
Mohammed (mo-h&m'ed), 97, 129-134, 
160, 238 

Mohammedanism, 256 
Mohammedans, 132, 134, 135, 147, 150, 
151, 158, 160, 164, 186, 221, 233, 376 
Moldavia (mol-da/vi-a), 375 
Moliere (mo'ly-ar'), 428 
Moluccas, 229 
Mongolians, 295 

Montenegro (mon'te-ne'gro), 435, 439 

Montesquieu (m5n'tes-ku'), 328 

Montez, Lola, 381 

Montpellier, 206 

Moors, 136, 227, 247, 260, 367 

More, Sir Thomas, 249 

Morea, 375, 376 

Morocco, 134 

Morse, Samuel, 399 

Moscow, 29, 128, 200, 292, 296, 298, 
300, 302, 346 

Moses, 34, 36, 37, 114, 130, 161 
Moskwa River (mSs-kva/), 296 
Moslems, 131, 134, 160, 162 
Mozart, 431 

Mukden (mook'den'), 261 
Munich, 200 

Mycenae (ml-se'ne), 45, 51 
Mylae (ml'le), 92 



INDEX 


483 


Napier, John, 391 
Naples, 158, 202, 206, 364, 381 
Napoleon III of France, 384, 385, 387- 
389, 395 
Narva, 303 
Naseby, 281 
Navarino Bay, 377 
Nazareth, 113, 117, 121 
Nebuchadnezzar (neb'u-k£d-nez'ar), 33, 
83 

Necker, 330-333, 336 
Negus, 433 
Nelson, 345 
Neptune, 122 

Netherlands, The, 259, 260, 263, 264, 
279, 363, 379, 426 
Neva River, 293, 302 
Newcomen, Thomas, 394 
New England, 317, 410 
Newfoundland, 228, 276 
New Guinea, 433 
New Lavark, 412 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 391, 392, 416 
New York City, 395 
New York, 395 
Ney (na), 350 
Nice (nes), 385 

Nicholas I of Russia, 128, 379, 381 
Nicholas II, Pope, 155 
Niebuhr (ne'boor), 29 
Nieuw Amsterdam, 265 
Nile River, 16-18, 21, 22, 25-28, 34, 
79, 81, 99, 107, 121, 149, 197, 221, 
232, 345, 421, 434 
Nineveh (mn'e-ve), 32 
Noah, 28, 32 

Normandy, 142, 145, 179, 272 
Norsemen, 141-145, 147, 150, 221, 224, 
272, 293 

North America, 265, 319 

North Cape, 276 

North, Lord, 320 

Northmen, 228 

North Sea, 195, 263, 271, 280 

Northumberland, 350 

Northumbria, 271 

Norway, 141, 225, 269, 271, 364 

Nova Zembla, 264 

Novgorod, Republic of (nov'go-r6t), 195 


Nuremberg, 305 
Nyanza, Victoria, 435 
Nymwegen, 136 

Octavian, 107, 109 
Odoacer (o'do-a/ser), 120 
Oersted, Hans (ur'steth), 399 
Oldenbarneveldt, 269 
Olympus, Mount, 50, 68, 70 
Omar, 133 

Orange Free State, 434 
Orient, 170, 193, 194 
Orleans, Duke of, 380 
Osiris, 23, 26, 423 
Ostend, 263 
Ostian Road, 111 
Otto, 138, 154, 185 
Ovid, 207 
Owen, Robert, 412 
Oxford, 203 

Pacific Ocean, 228, 232, 314, 433 
Padua, 203 
Paine, Thomas, 338 
Palatinate (pa-lat'!-nat), 265, 266 
Palatine Hill, 110 

Palestine, 36, 37,133, 160, 161, 164, 165, 
186 

Palos, 227 

Panama, Isthmus of, 228 
Papal States, 136 
Papin, Denis, 392, 394 
Pariahs, 236, 237 

Paris, 134, 168, 202, 206, 215, 258, 289, 
318, 319, 330, 331, 333, 336, 337, 339, 
345, 347, 348, 352, 372, 378, 380, 381, 
389, 395 
Parisians, 389 
Parma, Duke of, 263 
Parsifal, 168 
Parthians, 105, 117 
Patagonia, 228 
Paul, 111, 112, 115, 117, 123 
Paul I of Russia, 345, 346, 359, 360 
Paul III, Pope, 258 
Pausanias, 74 
Pavia, 120 

Pedro de Covilham, 223 
Pelasgians, 50, 66 



INDEX 


489 


Peloponnesus (pel'6-po-ne'sus), 50, 375 

Pennsylvania, 317 

Pen-y-darren, 395 

Pepin the Short, 136 

Pericles, 75, 76 

Persia, 27, 42, 126, 133 

Persian Gulf, 223 

Persians, 27, 30, 42, 69-74, 129, 421 
Peter, 123 

Peter I of Russia, 299-303, 307 
Peter the Hermit, 161 
Petersburg, 360 
Petra, 112 

Petrarco, Francisco (pa-trar'ka), 206 

Petrograd, 325 

Pharnaces, 107 

Pheidippides, 72 

Philadelphia, 324 

Philip, 77 

Philip II of Spain, 229, 259, 260, 262, 
274, 275, 279, 367 
Philip IV of France, 222 
Philip IV of Spain, 290 
Philippine Islands, 229, 434 
Philistines, 36 

Phoenicia (fe-nish'i-a), 77, 133, 169 
Phoenicians, 38-40, 69, 70, 81, 83, 90, 
129, 221, 232 

Pileser, Tiglath (pi-le'zer), 439 

Pilgrims, 320 

Pindar, 429 

Piraeus (pl-re'us), 72 

Pius VII, Pope, 344 

Placentia, 93 

Plantin, 215 

Plataea (pla-te'a), 71, 74 
Plateau of Iran, 40 
Plato, 127, 208, 216 
Plevna, 435 
Pliny, 216, 398 
Plutarch, 341 
Plymouth, 350 
Po River, 93, 381 
Poincar6, 441 
Poitiers (pwa'tya/), 134 
Poland, 203, 303, 337, 356, 363-365, 
367, 379 
Poles, 379 
Polo, Marco, 217 


Poltana, 303 

Pombal, Marquis de, 368 
Pompeii (pom-pa'e), 398 
Pompey, Gnaeus, 104-106 
Pontius Pilatus, 113-115 
Pontus, 104 
Port Arthur, 433 
Portinari, Beatrice, 204 
Porto Rico, 434 

Portugal, 221,226,230,310,346, 365, 368 
Portuguese, 221, 227, 230, 233, 243, 
264, 314, 409 
Praetorians, 117 
Presbyterians, 281 
“Prester John,” 223 
Preston Pans, 281 
Priam, 43 

Protestants, 253, 255, 256, 260, 263, 305, 
317, 367, 413 

Prussia, 304-307, 337, 346, 352, 356, 
361, 366, 369, 382, 386-389, 413 
Prussians, 342, 349, 381 
Ptolemy (tol'e-mi), 106, 107 
Ptolemy, Claudius, 224 
Puritans, 281, 282, 317, 320 
Pyramids, 49 

Pyrenees (pir'e-nez),92,93, 134, 136, 186 
Pyrrha, 49 

Quakers, 317 

Quintus Fabius Maximus, 95 
Quirinal, 385 

Ranke, von (ran'ke), 244 
Raphael, 215 
Ravenna, 120, 136, 204 
Rawlinson, Henry, 29 
Red Sea, 223 

Rembrant, 219, 422, 427, 432 
Remus, 86 

Republic of Novgorod (nov'go-rot), 195 
Rhine River, 105, 206, 252, 339 
Rhodes, 164 
Rhodes, Cecil, 434 
Rhone River, 93, 194 
Rialto of Venice, 230 
Richard I of England, 179, 180 
Richelieu, Cardinal de (re'she-lyh'), 
268, 287 



490 


INDEX 


Rio de Janeiro, 365 
Robert of Flanders, 161 
Robert of Normandy, 161 
Robespierre (ro-bes-pyar'), 338, 339, 
342, 380 

Rochefort (rosh'for'), 349 
Rodin (ro'dSn'), 432 
Roland, 137, 151 
Rollo, 142 

Roman Empire, 81, 97-99, 101-110, 
118, 121, 124, 127, 128, 137, 141, 146, 
154, 160, 164, 166, 169, 170, 177, 183, 
208, 213, 292, 295, 298, 425, 442 
Romanov (ro-ma'nof), 298 
Romans, 17, 27, 33, 40, 79, 81, 86, 88- 
92, 95-97, 99, 100, 104, 109, 115, 116, 
121-123, 125, 129, 135, 137, 138, 143, 
149, 183, 184, 190, 232, 366, 375, 391, 
414, 421, 423, 425, 429, 444 
Rome, 62, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88-93, 95, 96, 
98-107, 109, 110, 116-118, 120, 122, 
123, 125, 127, 135-137, 140, 141, 146, 
147, 153, 154, 157, 170, 177, 191, 193, 
206-208, 210, 213, 232, 247, 248, 
250, 251, 256, 271, 274, 283, 303, 381, 
385, 438, 439, 442 
Romulus, 86 

Romulus, Augustulus, 120 
Rosetta River, 7 
Rossi (ros'se), 381 
Rotterdam, 249 
Roumania, 375, 435 
Rousseau (roo'so'), 328, 359, 368 
Rubicon River, 106 
Rudolph of Hapsburg, 159 
Runnymede, 179 
Rurick, 293 

Russia, 121, 128, 195, 213, 277, 292, 
293, 295, 299, 301, 303, 307, 344, 345, 
356, 359, 361, 364, 369, 374, 375, 377, 
380, 384, 425, 433, 435, 443 
Russians, 266, 325, 326, 375, 435 

Sabines, 86 

Saguntum, 93 

Sahara, 222 

St. Agnes, Mount, 211 

St. Florence of Assisi, 203 

St. Helena, 160, 343, 350, 352 


St. Lawrence River, 318 

Saint Louis of France, 158 

St. Petersburg, 375 

Sais River (sa'is), 27 

Sakiyas, 233, 234 

Salamis, 73 

Salerno, 158, 202 

Salvation Army, 258 

Samaria, 113 

San Stefano, 435 

Sarajevo (sa'ra-ya-vo), 436 

Sardanapalus (sar'da-na-pa'lus), 27 

Sardinia, 92, 359, 381, 383-385 

Sardinians, 381 

Savannah, 396 

Savery, Thomas, 392 

Savonarola (s&v'6-na-r5'la), 209, 210 

Savoy, 385 

Saxons, 120, 125, 127, 136, 143, 271 

Saxony, 251, 252, 303, 356, 366 

Scandinavia, 223 

Schleswig (shlas'vik), 143, 386 

Schliemann, Heinrich (shle'man), 43-45 

Schnups, 292 

Schumann, 351 

Stilly Islands, 38 

Scipio, Lucius (sip'i-o), 100 

Scipio, Publius, 93, 96, 99, 100, 103 

Scotch, 281 

Scotland, 275, 281, 286 
Scottish Whiggamores, 283 
Seine River, 202, 395 
Selden, John, 264 
Semites, 32, 40, 81, 129 
Senegal River, 221 
Serbia, 269, 435, 439 
Serbians, 436 
Servetus, Michael, 256 
Seville, 218 

Shakespeare, William, 277, 428 
Shantung, 435 
Sheffield, 200 
Shem, 32 
Shipka Pass, 435 
Siberia, 298, 433 
Sicily, 76, 85, 91, 92, 158, 381 
Siddhartha (se-dar't ’ha), 234, 236-238 
See Buddha 
Sidon, 38, 169 



INDEX 


491 


Silesia, 306 
Sinai, Mount, 36 

Slavs, 120, 127, 147, 293, 295, 304, 365, 
369 

Smith, Adam, 405 
Socialists, 412, 413, 440 
Socrates, 376 

Solferino (s&l'fe-re'no), 385 
Solon (so'lun), 59, 89 
Sophia, Sister, 299, 300 
Sophie, 285 

Sophocles (sSf'6-klez), 67, 208 
Sorbonne, 258 

South America, 227, 371-374, 

377 

Spain, 38, 40, 83, 92, 93, 96, 101, 105, 
134, 136, 160, 181, 186, 203, 221, 226, 
227, 230, 245, 247, 259, 260, 275, 278, 
290, 310, 345, 346, 365, 372, 374, 388, 
427 

Spaniards, 221, 230, 232, 233, 243, 246, 
260, 263, 264, 276, 314, 345, 365, 371, 
408 

Sparta, 53, 71, 72, 74-77 
Spartans, 72, 74-76 
Speyer (spe'er), 253 
Sphinx, 343 
Spice Islands, 228, 229 
Spinetti, Giovanni, 430 
Stanley, Henry M., 434 
Stephenson, George, 396 
Stoics, 114, 122 
Stradivarius, 430 
Strait of Gibraltar, 38 
Stralsund, 266 
Strassburg, 357 
Streltsi, 300 

Stuarts, 266, 277, 280, 282, 319 

Suddhodana, 233 

Suez Canal, 434 

Sulla, 103, 104 

Sumatra (soo-ma'tra), 207 

Sumerians, 29-31, 39 

Sussex, 271 

Sweden, 141, 181, 185, 202, 248, 266, 
290, 303, 364 
Swedes, 247, 268, 364 
Switzerland, 182, 211, 269, 380 
Syracuse, 95 


Syria, 99-101, 105, 110, 111, 133, 160, 
165, 342 
Syrians, 96 

Talleyrand, 356, 357, 359, 363, 389 

Tarik, 134 

Tartar Khan, 296 

Tartars, 147, 296 

Tashkent, 295 

Taurus, Mount, 98 

Tetzel, Johann, 251 

Teutoburg Woods, 109, 138 

Teutons, 103, 105, 109, 125, 295 

Thales, 398 

Thames River, 179, 203 
Thebes, 27, 51, 121, 360 
The Hague (hag), 262 
Themistocles (th^-mis'to-klez), 72, 73, 
350 

Theodoric (the-Sd'o-rik), 120 
Thermopylae (ther-mop'i-le), 73, 74 
Thessaly (thes'a-li), 50, 73, 74, 99 
Thomas, 128 

Thucydides (thft-sid'i-dez), 50 

Tiberius, 113, 128 

Tiber River, 85, 86, 96, 385 

Tidor, 229 

Tigris River, 28 

Tilly, 266 

Tiryns (ti'rinz), 51 

Titans, 45 

Torbay, 284 

Tordesillas, 230 

Tories, 283-285, 374 

Toul, 268 

Toulon, 342 

Tours, 134, 135 

Toussaint L’Ouverture (too's&n'loo'vSr'- 
tiir'), 372 
Transvaal, 434 
Trebia, 93 

Trevithick, Richard (trev'i-thik), 395 
Tripolitsa (tre'po-lye'tsa), 376 
Troy, 43, 44, 52, 66 
Tudors, 277, 285 
Tunis, 194 

Turgot, 328, 330, 331, 405, 407 

Turkestan, 295 

Turkey, 359, 376, 384, 435 




492 


INDEX 


Turks, 33, 128, 160-162, 165, 172, 208, 
213, 292, 296, 365, 366, 375, 376, 435, 
436, 439 

Tyre, 38, 83, 96, 169 
Uhlans, 347 

United States, 304, 372-374, 385, 395, 
409, 434 
Ur, 34, 54 

Ural Mountains, 292 
Urban II, Pope, 160 
Utrecht (u'trekt), 261, 290 

Valens, 120 

Valladolid (val'ya-tho-leth'), 203 

Valley Forge, 152 

Vandals, 120 

Varennes, 336 

Varro, 95 

Varus, 109 

Vasa, 266 

Vatican, 385 

Vega, Lope de (da va'ga), 428 
Velasquez (va-las'kath), 427 
Venetians, 193, 221, 366, 439, 444 
Venezuela, 372 

Venice, 162, 164, 172, 191, 193-195, 215, 
217, 230, 381, 430 
Verdun, 268 
Vermeer, 427 

Verrazano (ver'rat-sa'no), 317 
Versailles, 289, 327, 330, 334, 336, 352, 

386, 389 
Vesalius, 256 
Vespucci, Amerigo, 228 
Vesuvius, 398 

Victor Emmanuel of Italy, 381 
Victoria, Queen, 379, 384, 435 
Vienna, 331, 336, 337, 350, 356, 357, 
364-367, 370, 371, 378, 380, 382, 385, 

387, 389, 405, 430 
Vikings, 141 

Vinci, Leonardo da (da ven'che), 215 

Virgil, 205, 207, 216 

Virginia, 320, 324 

Visigoths, 134 

Vistula River, 379 

Volkhov River, 293 

Volta, 399 

Voltaire, 328, 359, 368 


Wallenstein, 266, 268 
Walpole, Sir Robert, 286 
Walter-without-a-cent, 161 
Warm Wells, 73 
Wartburg, 252, 369 
Washington, D. C., 387, 390, 399 
Washington, George, 152, 322 
Waterloo, 343, 349, 380 
Watt, James, 394, 395 
Wellington, Duke of, 349, 365, 378, 406 
Wends, 304 
Wessex, 271, 272 
West Indian Company, 265 
West Indies, 283 See Indies 
Westphalia, 265, 268, 289 
Weyler, General (wa/ler), 435 
Whigs, 283-286, 374 
White Sea, 292 
Whitney, Eli, 394 
Wilberforce, William, 409 
William I of Prussia, 388 
William III of England, 261. 262, 284, 
285, 290, 291, 319, 379 
William of Hohenzollern, 441 
William the Conqueror, 157, 272 
William the Silent, 379 
Willoughby, 276 
Wittenberg, 250, 252 
Worchester, Marquis de, 392 
Worms, 252 
Wurtemberg, 366 
Wycliffe, John (wik'lif), 211 

Xerxes (zurk'sez), 42, 74, 77 

Yasodhara, 234, 236 
Yellow Sea, 238, 433 
Ypsilanti, Prince Alexander (!p's§- 
lan'te), 375 

Zama, 96, 99, 100 
Zarathustra, 40 See Zoroaster 
Zeus, 50, 62, 88, 423 
Zipangu, 227 See Japan 
Zoe, 128 

Zoroaster, 40, 233 
Zwinglians, 254 
Zwolle (zwbl'e), 211 


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Cranberry Township, PA 16066 









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